This May Be The Best Time To Sell Your iPhone If You Want To Buy ‘iPhone 5′

As it happens every year, resale prices of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 will start falling at a high rate amidst rumors of the new iPhone making its debut in a matter of less than a month.


Since the new iPhone is likely to have a larger screen and a thinner design, support 4G LTE networks and not merely an incremental upgrade, a lot of folks would be planning on making the purchase once Apple releases the device. This in turn means that a lot of old iPhones are in or soon will be in the resale market.

Nextworth and Gazelle, two popular sites that specialise in electronic gadgets repurchases, are a good indicator of the general trend of iPhone resale prices. Attached below are graphs showing the price drop in the resale value of the iPhone back when the iPhone 4S was announced.

Huffington Post spoke to a Gazelle's Chief Gadget officer, Anthony Scarsella, who keeps a close track of the resale price patterns of various gadgets:

That precipitous decline in trade-in prices for the iPhone 4S hasn't occurred quite yet, Gazelle's Chief Gadget Officer Anthony Scarsella said in a telephone interview: A 16GB AT&T iPhone 4S in good condition still fetches $277 on Gazelle, or more than enough to defray the initial cost of buying a 16GB AT&T iPhone 5 when it becomes available next month.

Scarsella assumes that the bottom will fall out of these inflated iPhone prices near the beginning of September, or about two weeks before Apple's iPhone event and three weeks before the actual release; that's in line with when prices started falling last year.

Since right now seems to be the appropriate time to sell your iPhone 4S or iPhone 4 to prepare for the next iPhone, we put together a handy chart listing out the prices of all models of the iPhone on NextWorth and Gazelle:

There might be slight variations depending on your carrier and the color of the device, but in general Gazelle seems to be the better option. The price you'd get on both sites would also depend on the condition of your device. You could of course get more money for your iPhone on eBay or Craigslist but the advantage with sites like Gazelle lies in the fact that you can lock in the resale price right now, and send them the device within a period of 21 days.