Here's How to Buy the New iPhone for a Steep Discount
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This is Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Your Money Matters. I'm J.R. Whalen in New York. On Tuesday, Apple announced its long-awaited iPhone 8, starting at $699, and the long-awaited iPhone X, starting at $999. But what if you could get those iPhones for half the price? MarketWatch reporter Jacob Passy has run the numbers and joins me in the studio. So, Jacob, Apple's not actually dropping the price of the new iPhone just yet, but there are ways a consumer can soften the blow if they take the plunge.
Correct. Yeah. So Apple is not discounting its new products. They would probably would never do that.
How can trading in an old iPhone cut the cost of the new iPhone by up to 50%?
But what you can do is you can trade in your old Apple device and be able to put that money towards the money that that device is worth towards the cost of a new iPhone in this case.
So what has that market been like?
Has it been sort of fluctuating? It has been. So there are so many smartphones on the market right now that the trade-in value of an old iPhone has gone down this year. And so folks are going to find that they are not going to get as big of a bang for their buck or a bang for their device as it were. as they would have in the past. So in the past, you know, when the iPhone 7 rolled out last year, there were consumers who were able to get it basically for free by trading in their old iPhones. This year, you're probably only going to get about a 50% discount if you have a fully, you know, the highest value device that you could have.
Okay, so that'll put some money in your pocket. And you could hope, you know, if you want to take that to the Apple store and buy a new iPhone. Now, there are a couple things at play here. So the carriers have been backing off their aggressive promotions in terms of... Allowing people to trade in and upgrade. And from the story in MarketWatch, it seems as if many of them have been backing off. Sprint has not. Is there pressure on them to come back and make them more aggressive offers?
You know, I think it's a matter of, you know, these smartphones have become so popular that, you know, the incentive is not as much there. And I think there was a period of time where that was a way that they could compete with each other. But I think that that has lessened in recent years. I think, you know, the demand for these products is just so high that they don't need to entice customers beyond just saying, you know, we have the iPhone 10 or the iPhone 8.
But this is really important to Tim Cook and Apple for this market to be robust because, you know, people spend a lot of money on these phones. They use them all the time, and it's a part of their lives. And he needs people to go ahead and make an upgrade and to go to the resale market and step up. And so he needs that market to be attractive to consumers.
Oh, for sure. Yeah, no, Apple, it's definitely in Apple's interest for folks to want to trade in their phones, and that's why you can still get a pretty significant discount. And also, it's worth pointing out, you know, when the iPhone X is rumored to be worth, to cost significantly more than previous models, you know, that factors into it, too.
All right. We're speaking with Jacob Passy from MarketWatch on the resale market for iPhones and a chance to what could potentially allow you to go to the Apple Store and get a new iPhone for maybe half the price. And you're listening to Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening, everyone. So, Jacob, now, aside from the state of the resale market, Apple's frequent release of new devices seems to also maybe get in the way of people wanting to upgrade. I mean, you would think that, I guess, if Apple had their way in a perfect world, people would just be running to the resale market and running to the websites and running to the Apple Store to trade in their phones and their devices as often as there are new devices out on the market.
So... It would seem kind of counterintuitive that people would want to upgrade so frequently, but it's like they need that for the circulatory system of this iPhone market and just the smartphone market to stay alive.
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