iPhone Offers Better Resale Value Than Android or BlackBerry

You typically look at the resale value of items like cars, property etc. before you buy them. You can now check the resale value even for smartphones.

Priceonomics - the firm that tracks the resale value of items like cars, bikes, gadgets etc has published a report that provides resale value of smartphones.

If you've bought an iPhone then you have taken the right decision as Priceonomics reports that pricing data strongly indicates that iPhone is a better value than other smartphones.

Priceonomics explains how they went about coming to that conclusion:

We measure depreciation by comparing a phone’s current used price to its new price (without a contract) the day it was released. We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. We split phones into five different cohorts (newly released, 1, 2, 3, and 4 year-old phones). We then calculated which phones had the best resale by cohort, as well as which platforms in aggregate tended to retain their value the most.

The highest quality phones should have the best resale values over time and crappier phones should depreciate the fastest. The evidence is clear - the winner is the iPhone.

Priceonomics found that iPhone retains 53% of its value after using it for 18 months compared to 42% for Android and 41% for BlackBerry. They also found that iPhone retains more of its original value than Android and BlackBerry phones.

It is even more impressive when you see how much value the iPhone holds in the first 6 months.

They have some buying tip for iPhone users:

Skip those extra GBs on your iPhone. An additional 8GB of hard drive costs you an extra $100 upfront but only adds $10 to the resale value of your phone. The secondary market doesn't value extra hard drive space on an iPhone, so get the one with the smallest amount of disk space.  

It’s cheaper to break your contract than buying phones without a contract. Even with a $350 early termination fee, it’s usually $100 cheaper to get a subsidized phone and break the contract than buying a no-contract unsubsidized phone. Carriers want you to sign a contract so they create an incentive to do so. 

Priceonomics concludes:

There is a beautiful and liquid secondary market for phones, and in that market, the iPhone reigns supreme. We built Priceonomics to create data so that consumers could make better decisions. Our data suggests that buying an iPhone is a better economic decision than an Android or BlackBerry. If you buy an iPhone, down the line you will have a piece of hardware that still has economic value.  

Priceonomics believes that though you can always read reviews about an item, resale value is the best objective indicator of product quality.

Still planning to buy or switch to an Android?

[Priceonomics source GigaOM]