Do not throw away your old Galaxy phone or sell it on the secondary market. Samsung has shown in the last year that old handsets hold their value as they gather dust in your drawer.
In the last 12 months, Samsung has focused on running promotions with enhanced trade-in prices instead of straight money-off discounts for new Galaxy phones. That has resulted in some astonishingly high prices for years-old phones.
For example, a December promotion for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 presented some of the reviews that I have noticed on older phones.
These phone prices are not repeated when buying cheaper Samsung phones, such as the Galaxy S24 Ultra. With that said, S24 Ultra buyers still get some of the best prices on the market for older handsets.
It’s not just Samsung playing this game. A decent rule of thumb is that you will get the best trade-in prices for old phones from the company that made the device.
Google paid $650 for the Pixel 6 Pro last month, beating Samsung’s price by $300. Apple — a company that rarely engages in promotions — has matched some of Samsung’s iPhone trade-in prices in the last year.
Samsung, however, has surpassed Apple and Samsung in older pixels and iPhones several times in 2024. For example, Samsung will pay $300 for any Pixel, including the 2016 Pixel 1. The maximum Google will pay for this is $110. For Apple tech, Samsung will pay $300 for the iPhone 13, while Apple probably won’t pay more than $220 for any phone with the iPhone 12 Pro.
This affects the prices of third-party stores that make money from selling hardware, not subscriptions or data. Best Buy, Amazon, and others can’t cover the manufacturers’ standard costs (Amazon filed $5 for the Galaxy S8 Plus compared to Samsung’s $300).
That’s why we’ve noticed some of Amazon’s cheapest upfront costs in recent months, outperforming Samsung and others in sales.
Manufacturers are playing along with the industry because they need to keep users in their respective ecosystems. Samsung is wasting money by paying heaps of dollars for eight-year-old phones.
But Samsung’s installations for other people are far more valuable in the long run than simply promoting hardware. This could be especially true if Samsung decides to qualify for Galaxy AI this year, as it has continually hinted.
These increasingly high trade-in prices dramatically change how valuable your old Samsung Galaxy phone is. Combine this with new policies from manufacturers that promise software support for the best part of a decade and we will see more people holding on to their phones for longer than ever before.
One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts.
Our network tries to connect other people through open and considered conversations. We need our readers to share their reviews and exchange concepts and made in a space.
In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site’s Terms of Service. We’ve summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.
Your message will be rejected if we realize that it turns out to contain:
The user accounts will be blocked if we realize or think that users interact in:
So how can you be a difficult user?
Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service.