iPhone trade-ins doubled in month leading up to Samsung Galaxy S IV launch

Are people trading in their iPhones for Samsung’s new Galaxy S IV?

SellCell.com reports that iPhone trade-ins were up 194 percent in the month preceding last week’s Samsung Galaxy S IV launch, compared to the month before its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S III, was launched in 2012.

This is bad news for Apple, and it’s not just due to increased volume in the market either. Galaxy S III trade-ins actually declined in the same period, sagging 4.8 percent. And in the day following the S IV launch, iPhone trade-ins were up 42.2 precent compared to the already relatively high preceding two Fridays.

“Based on feedback from our partners and the news of several big product launches from HTC, BlackBerry and now Samsung, we get the feeling that the luster of the iPhone line for Apple fans may be waning a bit,” SellCell’s managing director Colin White said in a statement. “Our data bears this out as more people trade-in and search for iPhone quotes on the site than other product lines, an effect that we believe is from the introduction of new smartphones and features that iPhones don’t have.”

Apple occupies the entire top five spots in SellCell’s trade-in list right now, with the low-end iPhone 3G fetching only $40, while the much more recent iPhone 4 16GB brings in almost $190. And while iPhones, like Apple laptops and desktops, have traditionally held their value very well, Samsung devices are starting to do so as well.

“In particular, the growing, fierce rivalry between Samsung and Apple extends to the trade-in world as the GALAXY line of phones is beginning to hold value like the iPhone, which has traditionally been the best smartphone investment as it depreciates the least,” White said.

Although the Galaxy S IV price has not yet been revealed, SellCell has already assigned it a trade-in value of $550.