How much is a broken iPhone 7 worth?

Jul 17, 2019

Due to a mixture of bad luck and - as my mother put it - excessive trust in the iPhone capabilities, friday afternoon I was left without a functioning phone. All my trials of putting it in DFU mode and installing iOS from scratch were not succesfull at all: the phone kept on looping on the booting apple, pointing to a damage that was not only due to malfunctioning software but, unfortunately, to hardware. All this said, I began looking around to see what the best option was to sell this phone and get a new one.

• Non functioning iPhones on eBay or similar can get 30-50€ at best;
• selling it to a refurbishing store would have gotten me about 170€... if only the iPhone was functioning! Non working iPhones are valued a mere 10€.

On the other hand, I actually needed a functioning phone:

• brand new iPhones cost quite a bit, and this is no time for crazy expenses;
• secondhand iPhones can be a good deal, but this time I didn't want to live the hype of hoping it would have worked fine. Moreover, it's a job that requires time to compare the different options, time I couldn't afford to have this time around.
• Refurbished iPhones were a strong option, if they only were cheaper! This unexpected failure could have been a great escuse to jump to an iPhone X, but even refurbished it costs up to 650€. A refurbished iPhone 7 was 310€.

The solution I opted for is one I haven't listed above: going to an authorised Apple assistance center. After declaring the 7 beyond repair, they offered to exchange it for a brand new, identical 7 for 340€. Since a new 128GB iPhone 7 from the Apple store costs 660€, that meant my broken 7 was valued north of 300€ - the highest value I could get.

This story only applies to recent devices: my dad was offered a new Apple Watch Series 0 for 250€ if he would have given in his damaged one, a price that makes no sense at all given the very watch model he owns.

What have I learned from this story?
First, don't be too trusty on the phone resistance: testing its limit can bring a quite sour price tag;
Second, non-official ways are not convenient for fixing recent iPhones, recent being a phone that was released 3 years ago.
Third, being without a phone for 4 days can have its relaxing aspects. Notifications cannot reach you anymore, but only when you get back to the Mac and check telegram or email or messages. Whatsapp web, relying on the phone to be connected, was not available at all - not a great loss.

In the end, I read more and wrote more. Am I waiting for the new phone to arrive? Of course, being without a phone nowadays, especially being used to have one, can be quite of an inconvenience not only for communication purposes, but - say - to allow access via two-factor authentication.
Nonetheless, this phone vacation has been quite relaxing so far and could serve as an inspiration for future habits.

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