I recently traded in an iPhone 13 at the Apple Store. I was a bit nervous going into the store since the phone’s screen had several fairly deep (deep enough to catch a fingernail) scratches about ~2mm long, caused by rubbing against keys in my pocket. I couldn’t find conclusive evidence online about whether this damage would impact the phone’s trade-in value, so I decided to “be the DP you wish to see”.
When I walked into the store, I flagged down an employee who was ready to help me with the trade-in. Each of the employees have an app on their store phones that assists with trade-ins. First, the employee had me open the “About” page of my trade-in device. She took pictures of the IMEI and device SN; I presume the store app checks for any IMEI blacklist and carrier lock status at this stage. Then, the employee opened some feature in my device’s settings that runs an “internal check” and sends the results to the employee’s phone. I don’t really know what that does, but I assume iPhones have sensors that can detect water intrusion or similar and report those results during trade-in.
After the internal check, the employee took pictures of the front, back, and sides of my trade-in phone using her store phone. It seems like those pictures were sent to AI/an algorithm, because the employee’s phone returned a reduced trade-in value of $90 (instead of the full $225), citing visible damage to the display. The employee tried to re-run this automated external assessment using multiple different store phones but was unable to. It appears the results of this automated assessment are tied to the device serial number.
However, there is a way for them to bypass the automated assessment, and I believe it requires sign-off from a manager inside the Apple Store. The associate I was working with (to her credit) seemed very convinced that my phone was worth the full trade-in value, so she proactively got that approval after she couldn’t re-run the automated assessment.
The employee’s device asked the following questions during the manual assessment. (Note that these questions come from the receipt I received from the Apple Store, so these are official!)
- Is the front or back glass shattered, have more than one crack, or is missing?
- Is the display showing black screen only?
- Is the device bent WITH display separation?
- Does the enclosure have more than 13 dents and/or chips?
- Does the camera lens have any cracks that impact image quality?
- Are there any missing, excessively damaged, or non-functional buttons?
- Is there visible liquid damage which causes functional issues?
- Are the ports non-functional or device unable to hold a charge?
- Does the front glass have one crack in the display area or multiple cracks/chips on the edge?
- Is there burn-in, streaks, or screen bleeding on the display or are there more than 2 white spots?
- Is the display non-responsive to touch or the backlight non-functional?
- Does the enclosure have any minor cracks that don’t pose any harm or customized etching/engravings?
- Is the device bent OR have display separation?
- Is the camera non-functional or does the camera lens have small cracks/chips with no impact to picture quality?
- Is Touch ID/Face ID non-functional or missing?
- Is WiFi non-functional?
Note that there is no criterion about scratches on the display.
For my device, the associate answered “no” to all questions. I then disabled Find My, erased the phone, and received the full trade in value of $225 on an Apple gift card, right on the spot. The whole process took around 20 minutes.