September 2018 iPhone Price Tracking

We look at what has happened to the prices of iPhones since the announcement, what the hype has done to new and old phone trade in prices.

It’s been over a week since the release of the iPhone XS, and amidst the excitement of the new devices, a record-breaking number of you have traded in your old iPhones to get the new iPhone or the cut price previous additions.

We made a few bold predictions in our iPhone price tracking article, so let’s see how close we were at with each of them.

Recycling prices for the new models to drop more than £40

Of the 6 iPhones released in 2017, the prices for 5 of them dropped by well over £50. With only the iPhone X 64GB maintaining a similar trade in price. Many of the new iPhones dropped considerably more than the £50 prediction.

The following table has prices from the start of September 2018, the end of September 2018 and the difference, just to give a clearer outlook.

Turbulent prices between announcement and release

This year has seen a lot less turbulence between announcement compared to previous years, the shaded area above shows the time between announcement and release and there is change, but not as much as previous years.

Recycling prices drop immediately after announcement

Boy, we seem to have missed the mark on this one too, it appeared though none of the recyclers wanted to be the first to reduce the price of the latest phones. We weren't too upset to get this wrong as it meant the users of Compare and Recycle got a better deal for slightly longer.

Our Wrap up conclusions from our price tracking article had a couple suggestions that we still stick by;

For the yearly upgrader; go for the lower capacity versions as the depreciation rate appears to be lower

If you want to upgrade every year, then the lower capacity version retains its value better, and this has been shown this year once again. HOWEVER, the fact they have removed the iPhone X from the store is going to reduce the accessibility of this device so the depreciation should be even slower than previous models.