“Many of the people rushing to buy an iPhone 6 tomorrow will fund the purchase with a currency that’s growing in value: old iPhones,” Olga Kharif, Doni Bloomfield and Scott Moritz report for Bloomberg. “Used versions of the smartphone can be worth hundreds of dollars, thanks to rising demand for the earlier models in emerging markets and at home. This year, as many as three-quarters of Americans who upgrade their iPhones will trade in their devices, according to Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics LLC. That’s as many as 22.5 million old iPhones being handed in, up from only about half of users trading in iPhones for upgrades last year.”
“With IDC projecting that Apple Inc. will sell as many as 65 million iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices this year, carriers have blanketed consumers with advertisements: an iPhone upgrade every two years for life, as much as a $300 in credit for old models or promises to top any competitor’s promotion with an extra $50,” Kharif, Bloomfield and Moritz report. “Carriers are willing to help offset the cost of upgrading as the skirmish for customers intensifies. There are already more wireless devices in the U.S. than people, so adding new subscribers typically means winning them from a competitor.”
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, competition!
“A trade-in promotion ‘feeds the machine,’ David Heger, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co., said, by encouraging phone upgrades that bring in more revenue for phone providers offering installment plans,” Kharif, Bloomfield and Moritz report. “‘There may be still some promotional costs associated with doing these rebates in the short term, but I think the thought is that there’s enough value in used iPhones that they can get back most of that,’ Heger said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Less than 24 hours!
Keep warm, Samsung.
Regarding MDN’s take above:
At some point next year I’d definitely be interested in picking up a slightly used and unlocked 64 GB iPhone 5S to use as an iPod because it doesn’t seem as though Apple is ever going to update the iPod Touch with a newer processor. Hopefully the trade-in market will be glutted with used iPhones and the prices won’t be too high.