Apple’s iPhone Fold Could Be Worth Half Price In 12 Months

Source Domain: www.forbes.com

The iPhone Fold is already in production, but when it lands may come down to Apple fixing its reported hinge design issues. But before you put down $2,000 for one, there’s another number worth knowing: new research shows that a $2,000 foldable iPhone could lose as much as $1,292 in its first year if it follows the depreciation trends of every foldable that came before it.

iPhone Fold Predecessors Don’t Hold Their Value

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is one of the worst performing foldables when it comes to resale value. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg

Resale marketplace SellCell analysed the 12-month resale performance of flagship smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola and OnePlus, comparing foldables against traditional phones. The picture for foldables isn’t pretty.

Foldable owners lose an average of $997.69 after one year, which is nearly $400 more than the $605.32 lost by traditional slab-shaped smartphone owners. In percentage terms, foldables lose 64.6% of their value within 12 months, compared to 55.3% for standard phones. That means foldables retain just 35.4% of their launch price after a year, against 44.7% for regular flagships.

Five of the six largest value losses in the study came from foldable devices. The single worst performer was the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 1TB, which shed $1,479.99 in value within a year.

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Apple’s iPhone Fold Has One Thing Going For It

There is, however, slightly more to the story. Apple’s track record on resale value is significantly better than any other manufacturer, as we’ve seen from other similar studies.

The iPhone 16 lineup retained 51.5% of its value after 12 months, which was the strongest of any major manufacturer, ahead of OnePlus (46.8%), Google (40.8%), Samsung (39.5%) and Motorola (24.5%). Nine of the…

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