Ahead of the announcement of the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and first foldable iPhone next month, a new study from trade-in comparison site SellCell finds that most iPhones lose a considerable amount of trade-in value in the 10-day window between Apple's announcement and the actual product launch.
Looking at the launch of the iPhone 15, iPhone 16, and iPhone 17 lineups, SellCell found that trade-in values dropped for 117 of 156 models tracked, or 75% of the total, between announcement day and release day. That window saw the steepest declines for the iPhone 17 lineup last year, with 50 of 54 iPhone models (92.6%) losing value, with an average drop of $36.46 per device.
The largest individual declines came from older models still on the trade-in market at the time. The iPhone 16 Plus 512GB fell from $695 to $566, a $129 drop and the largest loss in the dataset. The iPhone 15 Plus 128GB saw the steepest percentage decline, falling from $440 to $351, a loss of 20.2%.
SellCell paired the pricing data with a survey of 2,000 U.S. iPhone users. 61.4% of respondents said they plan to keep their current iPhone until a replacement is in hand and set up, rather than trading it in around the announcement. The most common reasons cited were needing the phone for continued use and needing to transfer data, which together accounted for 77.4% of responses.
Apple updated and largely increased its own official trade-in estimates last month ahead of the iPhone 18 Pro and foldable iPhone announcement.
