- Has Twitter's Finest Hours (Seconds) Come and Gone?
- Intel's Andy Bryant Offers An Explanation
- Apple's Global Retail Invasion
- Intel Settles; AMD Settles the Score
- HP's Shot Across Cisco's Bow
- Back Off, Regulators!
- iPhone, App Strategy the 'New Dot Com?'
- Cisco Jumps; Rest of Market to Follow?
- Call It 'Microsoft Math'
- Intel in the Anti-Trust Crosshairs, but Why?
MOST SHARED
- Seeking Innovation in Health Care
- Today's Market Action
- Israel: Leader of Business Innovation
- Microsoft's Bill Gates Praises Apple's Steve Jobs For 'Saving the Company'
- Herbalife Vs. Hedge Funds
- Has Twitter's Finest Hours (Seconds) Come and Gone?
- Low Interest Rate Investing
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates: Keeping America Great
- Novo Nordisk CEO on Diabetes Epidemic
- CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping America Great
- Dollar is Not Plunging—So 'Calm Down': Market Strategist
- Strategists Say Markets Have More Upside — But How Much?
- Hirschhorn: Risk-Averse Traders
- Roginsky: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Financial Reform
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- TV Series Inks Unique Deal For Fight
- First Time Buyers Rescue Housing: Realtors
- Dollar General Trades Higher After Its IPO
- Fed Reform? Not So Fast.
- Oil Next Week: What Traders Will Be Watching

- Hedge Fund Billionaire Paulson Reports New Citi Stake
- Cramer: 5 Earnings Reports to Watch Next Week
- Court Rejects 'Clawbacks' for Alleged Stanford Victims
- Tax Credit Sparking First-Time Home Sales: Realtors
- Investors Cut Back US Stocks for Bigger Growth Abroad
- Cities With the Most Home Price Reductions
- White House Plans to Freeze Spending to Cut Deficit
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- Oil Next Week: What Traders Will Be Watching
RSS FEED
Tech Check
![]() |
Jason E. Miczek / AP Apple iPhone 1.0 |
Steve Jobs would ultimately issue an open letter to those early iPhone adopters after receiving hundreds of emails, offering a $100 store credit as a way to do right by his customers.
Flash forward a year later when so many Apple customers were buying iPhones even though they knew, or should have known, that a new, 3G version of the iPhone was imminent. Apple says it sold 717,000 iPhones last quarter, even though it was clearing the channel, making way for the new and improved one. I guess some iPhone customers couldn't wait. But for those who bought a few months ago, and feel like innovation is moving too quickly, making their existing products obsolete faster than the high price to buy them in the first place warrants? Take heart, you have an alternative to make a little of your money back.
Enter the folks at Rapid Repair. The company has launched an aggressive iPhone buy back program, with some customers receiving $150 for the old, 16 gig phones, and the company says it has already received hundreds of phones from iPhone 3G users. A 4 gig iPhone can yield $85; an 8 gig model $125, as long as the phone is 100 percent functional.
Now, Rapid Repair isn't in business with Apple, isn't a partner, isn't an Apple authorized reseller. But what it is doing is capitalizing on the feverish frenzy surrounding Apple and the speed at which the company is innovating.
"We realized there was gonna be a lot of people who were gonna want to upgrade their phone, and that there would be a big secondary market," the company's CEO Aaron Vronko told me this morning. "I think there's actually not so many differences that you should look at the first-Gen iphone as a great device. Just because something's a 10 (the new iPhone 3G) doesn't mean a 9 (old iPhone) doesn't shine."
He says he fully expects thousands of older generation iPhone users to contact his website, with anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million hitting eBay and other secondary market resellers. Why should iPhone users head to him? Mostly because it's a simple transaction without having to go through the hassles of listing the device on eBay [EBAY
Loading...
()
] or craigslist, he says. Most people visit those sites as buyers, Vronko says, and aren't experienced as sellers. His site will pay you a flat fee for the phone and its done. You get your money, he gets your phone, and you move on.
The price savings could be significant. He says a 3G iPhone on eBay without a contract, if you can find one, could go for as much as $750. He plans to sell used first-Gen iPhones for $200 or $250, depending on memory. And they will sell, he assures me.
"We're offering expediency and simplicity," he says.
Rapid Repair is based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, been around for five years or so, and Vronko says it's the largest, independent end-user iPod and iPhone repair service in the country, working on 500 devices a week. He's got high hopes for used iPhones too, whether people want to use them as a mobile phone or not.
"It's attractive as an off-network device too," he tells me. Unlike the iPod Touch, the iPhone's got a better processor, a speaker, a camera and works just fine like that. And if you install mobile Skype, you can find a Wi-Fi hotspot and still use the thing as a phone whether you're on a cell network or not.
Meantime, no matter how end users may end up using an older, used iPhone makes no difference. He's willing to pony up some cold hard cash for the chance to resell it. And that can make the speed of Apple innovation a little easier on your wallet.
Questions? Comments?









