iPhone Air loses value at record speed — what happened

The new iPhone Air is showing the steepest price drop of any recent Apple model. Within just ten weeks of launch, some configurations have lost nearly half their value. Meanwhile, the iPhone 17 lineup is holding its price far better and even outperforming previous generations on the resale market.

MacRumors reports the findings.

What the study reveals about iPhone 17 vs iPhone Air

Analysts at SellCell ran a ten-week study tracking depreciation across Apple’s latest smartphones. They reviewed real trade-in offers from more than 40 US buyback companies and compared the average resale price over time with each model’s original retail cost. All devices in the study were evaluated in "good" condition to ensure accurate comparison.

According to the data, the iPhone 17 series depreciated by an average of 34.6% over ten weeks — slightly better than the iPhone 16 lineup, which lost around 39% in the same period. The strongest performer remains the iPhone 15, with an average ten-week depreciation of 31.9%. For context, the iPhone 14 lineup showed losses of 36.6%.

Against this backdrop, the iPhone Air performs noticeably worse. On average, all configurations of the model have already lost 44.3% of their launch value. Depending on storage size, the drop ranges from 40.3% to 47.7%, making iPhone Air the weakest Apple lineup in recent years in terms of resale performance.

The 1TB version suffered the sharpest decline — SellCell calls it the worst-performing device in the entire dataset. Comparable drops have only been seen before in the iPhone 14 Plus and some configurations of the iPhone 13 mini back in 2022.

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