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We track iPhone prices post-announcement, exploring how hype affects new models, trade-ins, and whether now’s the best time to buy.
Written by Andrew Marchant, Marketing Manager | Privacy, Money-Saving and Parenting Advice
Last updated on 17 December 2025
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.
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.
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.
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;
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.
The iPhone used to define innovation. Now every new model feels the same. Is Apple’s story running out of pages?
See which Apple, Samsung and Google phones hold their value best over the first and second year on the market.
With Pixels becoming a decent contender for your upgrade choice, we’ve crunched the numbers to reveal depreciation patterns of Google Pixel phones.
