A lot, as it happened. Samsung was offering a staggering $1100 for my Fold 6. I checked, and that was approximately double what I could expect to get from selling the phone used. If you’re scratching your head on this one, yeah, it doesn’t make sense in terms of pure numbers. But Samsung and other companies often offer boosted trade-in value on their own hardware in an attempt to secure brand loyalty. (Or at least in order to secure multiple serial purchases, which I guess is the same thing.)
Luke Baker
There’s a cadence to this process, as you weigh the pros and cons between the maximum trade-in value at the time, your budget, and your desire for cool new gadgets. It made sense in this case. So I ordered the Z Fold 8, excited to see the rapid advancement of Samsung’s folding tech, and stoked that I got the new phone for effectively $800 plus tax.
The Z Fold 8 arrived on August 14th. I fell in love. It’s a downgrade for the cameras, since it lacks the third super-zoom on the rear and the interior selfie cam is no longer hidden under the display. But everything else about this phone is brilliant in pretty much every way. You can go read a review if you want more info, my point is I have no problems with the new phone. Even so, I hung on to my old one for a little over a week, just to make sure everything was properly transferred and I didn’t get buyer’s remorse.
Mattias Inghe
But even at that point, I was wary. The “old” phone was 100 percent functional, but it now had a very precise and deliberate value riding on it: $1100. That’s a pretty good chunk of my monthly income. And I’ve had phones disappear from shipping before, and been on the hook for them. So I took precautions. I took photos of the phone, wiped and operating. I took a video of myself packing up the device into the trade-in kit, once again showing that it turned on, that both screens were operating, and I’d shut it down before packing it up. I took more photos at the UPS store. I got the paper trail.
Samsung confirmed that it received the phone on August 31st, about a week after I dropped it off.
The trade-in nightmare begins
I don’t think you need to be Hitchcock to guess what happens next. On September 17th I got a text about an “important message” from Samsung. The trade-in program rejected the phone and would charge me $1100 for it. The company claimed that it wouldn’t turn on. For evidence it supplied two photos of a phone that, indeed, was turned off. So began my nightmare.