Much more than buying back an iPhone
Apple has a product buyback program called Apple Trade In. This is that, when we go to buy a new iPhone, if we deliver an old iPhone, that amount will be deducted from us in the new product of the same range. It is not, therefore, the same operation of a second-hand store, in which you are going to sell your iPhone in a physical location. And you can’t trade in an iPad to buy an iPhone, either. Or an Apple Watch to buy a Mac. If you want to buy an iPhone and get that discount, you’ll need to trade in an iPhone. And the same goes for the other products.
The prices that we will see below are much lower than those that we find in the second-hand market. But you have to know how to differentiate what an iPhone is in each context. On platforms like Wallapop, an old iPhone is a functional phone that someone else can take advantage of. Instead, for Apple, an old iPhone are raw materialsconcentrated in the same place, which can be re-extracted at a much lower economic and environmental cost, to re-manufacture new iPhones.
It is not the same, therefore, to have to find a supplier of lithium or cobalt, whose mining has a high economic cost. Or in the case of cobalt, for example, it is a rarer metal than lithium, and whose mining is more aggressive, with more extreme working conditions. Thus, Apple ensures a circular economy for its raw materials, paying consumers a discount. And it is very important to emphasize that these materials are in the same place, since Apple has the most difficult part of the work, the mining, processing and transfer of raw materials, already done. In fact, this location of the raw materials and their subsequent transfer is controlled by Apple, from the moment they receive the iPhone in the Apple Store, until it ends up being recycled.
The iPhone models for which Apple can give you money are updated every year. And if the current generation, which in this case is the iPhone 14, we will be able to deliver an iPhone from the generation immediately prior to this. Being, in this case, up to the iPhone 13 Pro Max the latest model, and the one with the highest value. Right now, the oldest model we can deliver is the iPhone 7. The price list is as follows:
- iPhone 13 Pro Max: up to €650
- iPhone 13 Pro: up to €565
- iPhone 13: up to €460
- iPhone 13 mini: up to €370
- iPhone 12 Pro Max: up to €445
- iPhone 12 Pro: up to €375
- iPhone 12: up to €335
- iPhone 12 mini: up to €280
- iPhone SE 2nd generation: up to €105
- iPhone 11 Pro Max: up to €330
- iPhone 11 Pro: up to €265
- iPhone 11: up to €250
- iPhone XS Max: up to €200
- iPhone XR: up to €170
- iPhone X: up to €130
- iPhone 8 Plus: up to €120
- iPhone 8: up to €85
- iPhone 7 Plus: up to €50
- iPhone 7: up to €35