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iPhone owners fuel 265% increase in eBay trade-in offers following iPhone 5 debut

Source: Apple

Current owners of Apple's iPhone, including the last-generation iPhone 4S, accounted for 69 percent of a 256 percent increase in trade-in offers through eBay's Instant Sale service after the new iPhone 5 was announced last week, while Android devices amounted to only 16 percent of total offers.

Since the iPhone 5 was announced on Sept. 12, eBay Instant Sale trade-in offers for legacy handsets increased 256 percent from the same period one week prior, according to metrics provided to AppleInsider.


While the data comes from offers generated by eBay's Instant Sale and do not reflect actual trade-ins, the numbers could be indicative of the overall trend in who is upgrading to the new Apple smartphone.

The huge jump in trade-in offers was driven mainly by existing iPhone users looking to offload their old devices, presumably to fund the purchase of the new iPhone 5.

In all, offers generated for iOS devices came in at 69 percent, followed by Android products with 16 percent and all others accounting for 4 percent. Of those iPhone owners requesting trade-in values, 46 percent were looking to sell the iPhone 4, 40 percent for iPhone 4S, 8 percent for iPhone 3GS and 6 percent for iPhone 3G. eBay further broke down the generated offers, saying the top five devices generating offers were iOS devices:

  1. iPhone 4 32GB AT&T
  2. iPhone 4s 64GB
  3. iPhone 4 16GB AT&T
  4. iPhone 4s 16GB
  5. iPhone 4s 32GB

While Apple has yet to win over the Android set, the iPhone upgrade market appears to be alive and well despite ever-increasing U.S. smartphone saturation.