Used iPhone: Why Buying One Now Is the Smartest Move

If you’ve been holding off on replacing your aging iPhone, the stars are suddenly aligning in your favour. A used iPhone has always had a compelling financial case — you spend less, you waste less — but a cluster of developments in 2025 have made that argument stronger than it’s ever been. Rising component costs, Apple’s own warnings about incoming price hikes, and a sweeping software update that will breathe new life into older hardware have all converged at once. The message is hard to miss.

• A used iPhone is a smarter buy in 2025 as Apple warns price hikes on new devices are unavoidable.
• iOS 27 will extend software support to older models, making a used iPhone last years longer than before.
• A global memory shortage driven by AI data center demand is pushing up costs across the entire supply chain.
• Refurbished phone sales are rising, but prices on used devices will eventually climb too — buying sooner is key.

Apple Is Telling You Prices Are Going Up

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook was unusually candid: price increases on Apple products are now ‘unavoidable.’ He didn’t name specific devices or put a date on it, but the direction of travel is clear. Apple isn’t doing this out of greed — or at least, not entirely. The culprit is a widening global shortage of the memory and storage components that go into virtually every consumer device Apple sells.

The shortage itself is a fascinating piece of collateral damage from the AI boom. The same NAND flash and DRAM chips that Apple needs to build iPhones and MacBooks are being snatched up in enormous quantities to build out AI data centres worldwide. Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Amazon — they’re all racing to stack servers, and the component pipeline simply can’t keep up with demand from both directions. That squeeze gets passed down the chain, and eventually it lands in the price tag of your next phone.

Tariff turbulence has added another layer of uncertainty. The Trump administration’s sweeping tariff regime — since partially reversed — sent markets lurching and forced Apple and its supply chain partners to rethink their cost assumptions. Apple has largely absorbed those costs so far; the company even released the MacBook Neo in March at $599, its cheapest MacBook ever, at a moment when component pressures were already building. But Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager at IDC, writing in an email to WIRED, suggested that Apple has built up meaningful goodwill in recent months and does not see the company squandering that by raising prices broadly. The likely targets, he and others suggest, will be the premium end — the Pro iPhones, high-end MacBooks, and whatever folding phone Apple eventually ships.

iOS 27 Is About to Make a Used iPhone Last Longer

Here’s the part that really changes the calculus on buying a used iPhone. At Apple’s WWDC keynote in early June, the company detailed significant changes coming in iOS 27, including improvements to its CPU scheduler — the under-the-hood system that manages how software resources are allocated across the device. The upshot is that even an iPhone 11, a phone that’s now six years old, should continue to run iOS 27 smoothly when the update ships this autumn.

That’s a genuinely big deal. One of the consistent risks of buying a used phone has been the looming shadow of software abandonment. Once Apple drops support for a model, the security updates stop, performance degrades relative to newer apps, and the device starts to feel like it’s falling behind. iOS 27 pushes that cliff further into the future — potentially by years — for a wider range of older devices.

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit — the repair-focused platform that has spent years pushing back against planned obsolescence — is blunt about what this means. ‘Buying used has never made more sense,’ he says. ‘The phones from the last few years are really good.’ Wiens would know: iFixit tracks repairability, component availability, and real-world device longevity more closely than almost anyone. When he says modern used iPhones are solid buys, it’s not a throwaway line.

The Repair Maths Strongly Favour Older Models

Beyond the sticker price of the phone itself, there’s the cost of keeping it alive. This is where owning a used iPhone gets even more attractive over time. Apple charges $119 to replace the battery in an iPhone 17. The same service on an iPhone 13 costs $89 — a $30 difference that might sound minor but adds up across multiple replacement cycles. Wiens puts it plainly: ‘You can save a lot of money buying a year-old phone and putting a new battery in it every six months.’

That’s a slightly extreme maintenance schedule, but the underlying point stands. Lithium-ion batteries degrade with every charge cycle, and a healthy battery is arguably the single biggest factor in how a phone feels day-to-day. A fresh battery in a two-year-old iPhone 14 Pro will feel dramatically better than a degraded battery in a brand-new device that’s had a year of heavy use. The repair economics reinforce what the software story is already suggesting: older, well-maintained iPhones are genuinely competitive devices in 2025.

The Used Market Is Booming — But Don’t Wait Too Long

The broader refurbished device market has taken notice of all this. Back Market, the Paris-based refurbished tech marketplace, saw a significant sales spike earlier in 2025 when consumers, spooked by tariff headlines, rushed to lock in prices before new devices got more expensive. CEO Thibaud Hug de Larauze says interest climbed again after Cook’s comments about unavoidable price increases. ‘They don’t want to pay like $2,000 for the next iPhone,’ he said. ‘We should just do everything possible to make people able to keep their devices as long as possible.’

That sentiment is becoming mainstream. According to Counterpoint Research, refurbished smartphone sales have grown in 2025, though at a slower pace than initially forecast. Most consumers still replace their phones around every 2.5 years, but that cycle is quietly stretching, and the cultural cachet of always having the newest model is fading as flagship prices test the $1,500-and-beyond range.

The catch? The used market isn’t immune to the same economic pressures pushing up new device prices. Hug de Larauze estimates it typically takes three to six months for increases in the new device market to ripple through to refurbished pricing. Wiens frames it in broader terms: ‘All the electronics in the world’s value have gone up. Kind of like the stock market rising in value, everything in your drawer is worth more now.’ A used iPhone bought today will almost certainly cost more to buy in six months than it does right now.

What You’re Actually Giving Up

None of this means a used iPhone is the right call for everyone. If you’re a professional photographer who relies on the latest computational photography features, or someone who wants day-one access to Apple Intelligence’s newest capabilities, a flagship new device has obvious value. Apple’s most recent camera hardware — particularly the Pro telephoto systems — is a genuine leap over anything from three or four years ago. Some AI features are also gated to newer silicon and won’t run on older devices regardless of the iOS version.

But for the vast majority of people — those using their phone for social media, messaging, streaming, navigation, and the occasional photo — a used iPhone from 2022 or 2023 running the latest iOS is essentially indistinguishable from a new one in daily use. The gap between the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 17 is nowhere near as wide as Apple’s marketing department would like you to believe.

The combination of forces now at play — a memory crunch with no quick resolution, a CEO openly warning about price hikes, a software update that explicitly extends the life of older hardware, and a repair ecosystem that makes maintenance affordable — points in one direction. If Apple’s next iPhone reveal this autumn comes with a significantly higher starting price, and the early indicators suggest it will, the value case for the used iPhone market will only sharpen further. The best time to think about going refurbished might be right now, before the rest of the market reaches the same conclusion.

Source: Wired

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