Submitted by Anders Batten on
Recent rumors about a September iPhone 5 release have caused a 70 percent increase to eBay's smartphone trade-in program. eBay said (via CNET) the number of trade-ins started to increase around the same time several well known sources purportedly confirmed Apple will hold a special event to announce the new iPhone on September 12. The company said "nearly" 100,000 smartphones were traded-in during a three day period following the announcements.
The 16GB model of the iPhone 4S topped the trade-ins, followed by the 8GB iPhone 4 and 32GB iPhone 4S. Last year eBay received 375,000 trade-in offers for smartphones when the iPhone 4S was officially announced. 89 percent of those smartphones were iPhones.
People are getting an early jump on trading-in their smartphones because older iPhones are known to decrease in value when a newer model is announced. However, I'm still kind of shocked people didn't learn their lesson from last year's iPhone 5 rumors. Remember, many tech blogs promised us a "tear-shaped" iPhone 5 that never materialized in 2011. Dumping your current iPhone based on internet rumors doesn't seem like a great idea if you ask me.