This is what Apple pays you for your old iPhone

March 31, 2023 Matt Mills Tips and Tricks 0

Apple is serious about recycling its devices to salvage components. Proof of this are the minerals and rare earths recycled from the iPhone. But did you know that Apple can buy back your iPhone to recycle it? In this post we are going to see how much they can pay you.

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 discounted on 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. On the other hand, for Apple, an old iPhone is raw materials , concentrated in one 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. In this way, 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: