Sell Your Mac With Apple’s Trade-Up Program

Apple has an official way to sell your old Mac and get an Apple gift card or cash. You can start at the Apple site and use their official buy-back partner to sell your Mac. You get a price estimate based on your Mac model and condition. If a model is too old or not working, you can also send it in for recycling.

Video Transcript: If you're ready to get rid of your old Mac to get a new one, you may want to get some cash for that old Mac. Now you may know that there are lots of different ways to do this. I mean, you could just sell it locally one Craig's List or try to sell it on EBay. There might be a shop locally that takes Macs and buys them back.
But Apple actually has an official way to do this. If you go to Apple.com/mac/trade-up you can get to this page here which allows you to trade in your Mac with an official partner. So it's not actually Apple that's doing it but it is this partner that Apple has. So they have approved them and there is some accountability here. 
So all you need to do is click through to go to the partner's website. So it's Fobio. It actually recently just changed from another partner. Here you can enter in the serial number for your Mac. So you go to the Apple menu and About This Mac to get your serial number. Or if you hit submit, it can't find it of course, and then you say Search For Device. 
Now we can select, say, the Apple MacBook Pro. For year let's say we're going to trade in a 2015 with an I-7 and 256 G of storage. Then you have to fill out some more information before it can give a price. Yes, it powers on. Yes, system loads. It's free from damage and it will be including power adapter. At the bottom you can see the price estimate. 
So you can then go and enter in more information. You can accept quote there. You can also just decide, at this point, if you want to get paid in an Apple Store gift card so you can apply it directly to your next Mac purchase. Or you can get, kind of, cash back by going to PayPal or getting a Visa card with that amount on it. Then you give it the information as well and you can follow through and ship them the device.
The reason this is an estimate, of course, is they can't guarantee that price until they get it and can verify that it is in fact working and not damaged and everything you said it is. So this is a really handy way and I like the fact that Apple gives you can official way to do this. 
Now here I've gone through it again but I've selected a very older MacBook. So it's 2009. I can see the price there isn't very much. But if I were to say, no the device doesn't power on, you can see it will actually then say it's not going to pay me anything but you can recycle the device for free. So there's that option.
Another thing on the official page is if you go back to the Apple site here, Apple.com/Mac/trade-up and I change Mac to iPhone you can see that there is also a program for trading in an iPhone. There doesn't seem to be any program for trading in an iPad. Not one that I can find. This is definitely a different type of program here but it's good to know that Apple has an option for that too.

Comments: 11 Responses to “Sell Your Mac With Apple’s Trade-Up Program”

Barbara Walchko

6 years ago

Funny you should have this in your newsletter because I'm in the process of doing that as we speak so far the process is been pretty smooth except the box that they send us is really flimsy and I offered to send it in the box that I got from Apple but they said no to use the box they have I will put in extra packing material just in case I'll let you know what happens

Barbara Shinn

Does one have to delete all files and content on the hard drive before sending it in or does the company do that. What is the best way to keep information private in this instance?

marshall coman

When I tried to open mac trade in apple.com/mac/trade-up it said will not open from this location ?? Marshall Coman

Soni Durham

Can't get to site...not open from this location..Soni Durham

Gary Rosenzweig

Marshall, Soni: Where are you located?

Barbara: Yes and no. Yes, they probably do wipe the drive. But NO you shouldn't rely on that, or even trust anyone else with your data. You should always wipe a device before giving it away, recycling it, or selling it.

Jeannie Allen

Google Apple trade up program and you'll find it.

Bwhahahaha $395 for a perfectly good working iMac including everything--a $2k computer and that's the trade in value for perfection? What a joke!

Robert

Hi Gary!
Does this apply for Canada?
Robert

Robert: No idea. Try it and see.

My trade completed. I had a hard drive failure and they said they would wipe any info that may reside in the SSD drive (fusion drive). Took 5 days to receive the box and another 7 days for them to receive it and 5 days to evaluate it (4th of July weekend). After accepting their offer it will take 3-5 days to receive the email credit for the Apple Store. The box is flimsy so add extra packing material or it will move around (2012 iMac 27") Offer was $275 but Gazille was $65.

Comments Closed.

Sell Your Mac With Apple’s Trade-Up Program

Comments: 11 Responses to “Sell Your Mac With Apple’s Trade-Up Program”

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