Phones that nobody wanted for 50 yuan before are now being snatched up across the entire internet.

Recently, buddies are opening their phones to surf the web, and they probably keep seeing news about memory price hikes.

A while back, several domestic phone makers officially announced that they would adjust prices for their phones, and many existing models already have increases of a few hundred yuan.

Xiaomi hasn’t raised prices yet, but considering that memory prices can’t really drop in the short term.

Even official sources have said they don’t rule out the possibility of future price increases.

And there are bloggers who report that the cost of a 16GB LPDDR5X + 1TB UFS 4.1 configuration has already exceeded 2300 yuan by the quoted price.

It’s even more expensive than a proper mid-to-high-end performance phone.

So it’s like we haven’t even gotten to enjoy the benefits from the AI model boom, but the bad side has already fed us.

So what about us, as regular smartphone users?

In this trend where new phones are seeing broad price increases, is there still any chance we can catch some “benefits,” too?

Yes, there is. Some brothers, yes.

Price hikes aren’t just for new phones. For the phone you’ve had lying around at home for years—when you take it to recycle or sell as second-hand, you might be able to get a pretty good price.

That’s right.

These days, a lot of buddies should have seen headlines like this on their feeds—

And some news reports are even more likely to get people itching to act.

“A scrapped phone with a completely shattered screen and that can’t even power on was only worth 10 yuan before; now the recycling price is 500 yuan.”

“As long as the motherboard hasn’t broken, even scrapped phones can be used for exchange—three or five scrapped phones can be used to directly get an iPhone.”

Wow, they didn’t say that earlier.

If the second-hand market is really that exciting, then I wouldn’t even bother using my old phone with whatever it is.

I’ll take that pile of junk from my house and recycle it, then—turn around and bring back an iPhone 17 Pro Max 2TB non-Hainan duty-free version.

Round-trip like that—won’t I be able to make 20,000 yuan and still have tears of joy?

Following this get-rich idea, Brother Ji also put a lot of thought into exploring the current phone recycling market.

Honestly.

The end result left me a bit disappointed.

Brother Ji first laid out the real parts clearly.

It’s true that the recycling price for old phones has gone up, and there’s nothing wrong with “a different price every day.”

This is mainly because the global AI industry has been hit by a huge surge.

The big storage-chip giants we can name all prioritize selling their production capacity to AI companies that bid higher and have greater demand.

So the memory production allocated to phones, tablets, and other smart hardware is naturally pretty limited.

Since production capacity can’t be increased in the short term, and purchase prices stay high.

Then the “ready-to-use” memory and storage chips inside old phones also become the kind of great bargains that are good value for money.

Anyway, over the past few days, Brother Ji has seen that a whole bunch of sellers doing second-hand recycling are all going after old phones and scrapped phones for recycling.

Because what’s valuable is only the “memory,” they don’t care about cosmetic condition, and they don’t even care whether it can power on.

As long as your phone’s motherboard, memory, and storage chips are good, they’re willing to pay higher prices to recycle it.

But the problem is this.

Can those “junk” items that are usually only worth a few dozen yuan really just, like that, be traded for a brand-new iPhone 17?

Brother Ji can give a responsible conclusion—no.

Although recycling quotes for all kinds of old models are higher than usual, the increase definitely isn’t as exaggerated as everyone thinks.

For example, before, if you sold a very old phone to a recycler, it might only be worth 20 or 30 yuan.

Now recyclers will probably quote you around 70 or 80 yuan.

If the phone model in your drawer that’s collecting dust is relatively old, and the memory spec is also relatively low.

Then the actual quote will be even lower.

Brother Ji took a Mate 9 that had been sitting at home for a long time and asked a recycler in his friend circle.

Because the memory is only 64GB, the other party was only willing to pay 40 yuan to recycle it.

If you then deduct shipping, the money you “earn” from recycling wouldn’t even be enough for a cup of Starbucks.

Some buddies might say:

“Since old models still aren’t worth much, if I take a flagship from the past few years to recycle it, won’t I be able to make more?”

Actually, Brother Ji thought about this before writing the article, and he also checked second-hand prices.

The actual situation is—

This so-called “surge in old phone recycling prices” has basically no impact on phones from the past one to three years.

For example, OPPO Find X8 Ultra.

The current second-hand price is still around 4,000 yuan.

Back when, you could often find good deals on the REDMI K80 至尊版.

Now on the platform that sells seafood-style second-hand goods, the price is still steady at 1600 yuan–1700 yuan.

Sounds strange, right?

If memory prices are rising a lot and demand for recycling old phones is also surging, why hasn’t it made the phones we have in our hands go up in price, too?

The reason is simple.

Slightly newer phones can still circulate normally in the second-hand market, and demand stays fairly stable, so prices won’t swing much.

Also, the surge in demand for memory in old phones isn’t from phone manufacturers.

On the one hand, the big phone makers can still purchase memory normally, they just pay more for the incoming stock.

On the other hand.

Phones have extremely high requirements for memory and flash speed and durability. If phone makers really took the memory from old phones and used it, it would likely cause daily use to lag and reduce the phone’s lifespan drastically.

But on the flip side.

These memory modules taken out from old phones are, for many smart devices that don’t have high requirements, basically treasure that saves a lot of money.

Like smart TV boxes, security monitoring, smart door locks.

These kinds of devices usually run very stripped-down systems, and they don’t demand much in terms of memory/storage read-write speed,

Using the memory extracted from “junk” through recycling is far more cost-effective than buying new memory.

In addition, in the auto market, we often see third-party “Android car head unit installation” services.

These third-party car-head-unit manufacturers, to keep costs down, are likely not paying for brand-new memory and flash that are priced through the roof.

What they do instead is to recycle large quantities of memory extracted from old phones, and install it into the car head unit for use.

That’s also why many third-party car head units feel really laggy.

Because inside, the memory and flash may have already been used close to the end of their lifespan.

Even on certain e-commerce platforms, there are 64GB and 128GB USB drives sold for 9.9 with shipping included.

The storage used in those could very well be extracted from old phones, too.

Seeing this, buddies probably have a pretty comprehensive understanding of what’s really going on with this recent “surge in old phone recycling prices.”

The ones that are truly getting price increases aren’t the second-hand phones that can still be used normally and have decent configurations.

It’s those “cyber trash” things that were obsolete years ago, where only the memory and storage are valuable.

If you have a drawer full of phones you don’t use anymore.

Then yes, you can find a channel to sell them. After all, leaving them idle is idle—getting some cash back isn’t a problem.

But if your phone’s configuration is still decent, and you can still sell it for a good price even on the “seafood market” platform.

Brother Ji recommends not just throwing it to a recycler at random.

Not only do you get no real pricing advantage, but data privacy is basically like running around nude.

Because now, even if you only restore factory settings on your phone, you can’t truly clean out all the data inside.

Once someone gets the device, they can use a recovery tool and get your data back in minutes.

Image from the internet

Made me happy for nothing

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