Which Phone Has Better Resale Value? An iPhone Or Samsung Galaxy?

Your phone was never meant to last forever. From battery life depleting with time to diminishing updates, processing power, and speculations about purposely slowing down older phones. No matter the reason, eventually, you'll want a new phone. When you do, you might want to maximize the value of your phone rather than just keep it somewhere to gather dust.

This is to say that you should give some thought to the resell value of a phone before buying it. Granted, no smartphone is a good investment because you lose money the moment it is used, but you can still maximize its value by thinking of whether you'll be able to get money back when trading it in or reselling it. For instance, newer phones are worth more when trading in than older phones. When choosing whether to get an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy, you might want to think about which brand will give you more money back when you trade it for a new phone in the future.

The official Samsung website lets you check how much a Samsung Galaxy phone is worth when trading it for a new one. For example, when trading a phone for the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra 5G, a Galaxy S20+ is worth $200, an S22 Ultra 5G is worth $325, and a Z Fold 4 is worth $405. Before you sell your Android phone, make sure you follow this guide.

As for iPhones, Apple's official trade-in website offers a nifty list of trade-in values for its devices. As of 2023, the estimated trade-in value of an iPhone 14 Pro Max is $650, while the iPhone 13 Pro is $480, and the iPhone 12 Pro Max trades at $450.

Though all phones lose their value quickly over time, the iPhone is definitely the leader when it comes to better and longer-term resale value. Even the official Samsung website will give you $525 when you trade in an iPhone 14 Pro Max in exchange for the Galaxy Z Fold 5, more than the $480 it'll give you for a Galaxy S23 Ultra 5G, its own flagship phone that launched a few months after.