iPhone launch impact on trade-in prices (2023-2025): three years, three different patterns

The snapshot

Same method, same 18 vendors, same 7 European markets, three different launch years, each tracked over the same 17-week observation window from early August to late November. The peak-to-trough decline ranges from a clean -15% down to essentially flat.

Methodology: Trade-in prices for the outgoing iPhone model, base 128GB storage tier, standard line only (Pro, Pro Max, Plus, and mini variants excluded), Grade A condition, checked weekly across the same 18 vendors in 7 European markets (Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Romania, France, and the UK), for the 17 weeks spanning early August to late November in each of 2023, 2024, and 2025.

A note on terms: we use "trade-in" throughout because it's the term most readers search for, but what we're tracking is the fast-moving cash offer a specialist recommerce platform quotes for buying a device outright — not the credit issued at a carrier or OEM trade-in counter, which typically resets less often and moves independently of daily market prices. In our glossary, this is what we define as buyback.

Three years, three shapes

2025: the clean crash. iPhone 16 trade-in offers were already down 5% the day before Apple's keynote, then kept falling through a single trough two weeks after the iPhone 17 shipped — 15% down from the early-August baseline. This is the pattern that most closely matches the industry shorthand of a launch-driven price crash.

2024: nothing happened. iPhone 15 trade-in offers moved less than 2% in either direction around the September keynote or the release date, and in the days immediately after launch, offers actually ticked up. The eventual low point, in late October, was still close to the early-August starting level. There is no launch-shaped event to point to in this year's data.

2023: a shock, then a full recovery. iPhone 14 trade-in offers dropped from 657 EUR to 573 EUR in a single day around the keynote — an 8.7% overnight move, the fastest of the three years. But it did not stick: by mid-October, offers had climbed back to within a few percent of where they started before the keynote. A larger decline eventually followed, but not until late November, more than two months after release — too far removed from the launch to attribute to it with any confidence.

What this means for recommerce operators

• 1Don't assume last year's pattern repeats. Pre-cutting trade-in offers three weeks ahead of the keynote would have been the right call in 2025 and mostly harmless in 2023 — but a needless discount in 2024, when prices barely moved. A launch calendar tells you when to watch. It does not tell you what you'll see.
• 2A fast drop is not automatically a lasting one. 2023's overnight 8.7% move had fully unwound within a month. Reacting to day-one price movement without confirming it holds for two or three weeks risks repricing off a move that reverses.
• 3Live monitoring beats a fixed playbook. With three different outcomes in three years, a static "cut offers by X% at launch" rule would have been wrong two years out of three. Competitor price monitoring that shows what is actually happening this cycle, week by week, is the only way to tell which of the three shapes you're in before the quarter is over.