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Why Are Higher Smartphone Prices Reshaping the Device Lifecycle?

Smartphone prices are going up, increasing the incentive to keep devices in service longer and recover more value from them when they are eventually replaced. The pressure extends across both iOS and Android, as manufacturers contend with rising memory costs driven in part by demand from AI data centers. 

Stephanie Larochelle Stephanie Larochelle is Content Marketing Manager at Blancco, where she covers secure data erasure and IT asset lifecycle management for corporate IT teams, ITAD providers and mobile device processors. She brings more than a decade of technical writing experience and a background in military service, information security and cybersecurity that informs her approach to data protection and regulatory compliance.

MacRumors reports that memory suppliers are prioritizing AI infrastructure over consumer devices, contributing to higher component costs. As replacement devices become more expensive, extending the useful life of existing smartphones makes increasingly good business sense. 

Blancco’s own erasure and diagnostics data shows the opportunity already sitting in today’s device fleets. Across the millions of devices processed through Blancco solutions, some of the highest-volume models include the iPhone 13, iPhone 14 and second- and third-generation iPhone SE. Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices show the same broader pattern. These are not obsolete devices, but they’re not new either. As consumers hold onto devices longer, many are finding out how much life these models still have.  

That matters because smartphones have become essential connected assets across both business and everyday life. The longer they remain useful, the greater the opportunity for organizations to securely erase, test, redeploy and resell them rather than retire valuable hardware prematurely.  

Higher prices are shifting demand toward used iPhones 

For five generations, from the iPhone 13 through the iPhone 17, Apple held the standard iPhone at $799. That ended in September, when Apple raised the price of every older iPhone it still sells by $100, taking the iPhone 17 from $799 to $899. The new iPhone 18 Pro started at $1,199, which is $100 above the iPhone 17 Pro it replaced.  The increase is largely attributed to the global memory shortage, which is affecting manufacturers across the electronics industry.  

MacRumors reports memory makers have been prioritizing supply for AI data centers, where contracts are more profitable, leaving less capacity for the chips used in consumer devices. That squeeze has pushed component prices across the electronics industry.  

Counterpoint Research reports that global smartphone shipments fell about 7% year over year in Q2 2026 across the industry as higher component costs pushed prices up. With new phones costing more, demand is likely to shift toward used and refurbished devices, and Apple’s own Trade In and Certified Refurbished programs show how much value these devices retain.  

Android is following the same pattern 

The memory shortage isn’t an Apple-specific story. Counterpoint Research has tracked price increases across most major Android brands, including Samsung, Xiaomi and OPPO, and expects global average smartphone selling prices to rise about 12% in 2026. In early October, Reuters reported that Samsung raised prices across most of its Galaxy S26 lineup by $100, and that Google’s Pixel 11 series also launched at higher prices than the previous generation. 

The impact is felt most at the lower end of the market where, as Counterpoint notes, a $100 increase weighs far more on a $200 phone than on a $1,000 one. The shift toward pre-owned devices follows the same logic. In India, refurbished smartphone volumes grew 13% year over year in the first half of 2026 even as new smartphone volumes fell. 

Android devices are also staying useful for longer. Samsung now offers seven years of software updates on Galaxy S series phones, and Google offers the same on newer Pixel phones. Shorter update windows once meant Android devices lost resale value faster than iPhones, and iPhones still lead on value retention overall, but resale marketplace data suggests the gap is narrowing as longer support gives buyers more confidence in older Galaxy and Pixel models. 

Counterpoint expects price increases to peak between Q4 2026 and Q1 2027, so the pull toward used and refurbished devices, on both platforms, looks set to continue into next year. 

Why verified erasure and grading matter as refurbishing goes mainstream 

Higher-value devices put more sensitive data in motion at the decommissioning stage, and they demand verified, certified erasure.  

Blancco’s 2026 State of Data Sanitization Report found that 43% of mobile devices organizations physically destroyed last year were still fully functional, and 32% of organizations that experienced a data leak traced it to a redeployed device that still had recoverable data on it. Both point to the same gap: device lifecycle management that isn’t built for devices that stay valuable long after their first owner is finished with them. 

Seventy-seven percent of organizations say they’d rather reuse retired devices than destroy them, but most aren’t sanitizing at the one point where erasure is easiest to verify: while the device is still connected to the network. That’s the gap that costs money on both ends, in data risk and in resale value walked away from. 

43% of mobile devices organizations physically destroyed last year were still fully functional

As refurbishing goes mainstream, trust becomes the currency of the secondary market. Buyers want to know a device is clean and what condition it’s really in, which takes grading on both the outside (cosmetic condition) and the inside (hardware and software diagnostics).  

Verified erasure and documented diagnostics give every device proof of condition that travels with it, supporting more trusted secondary marketplace transactions, fewer returns, and less frustration for the consumer. 

A phone kept longer, or resold into the refurbished channel, still holds value most organizations aren’t capturing. Blancco is seeing this pattern accelerate in real time across our own erasure and diagnostics data, and we’ll be sharing more of what that data shows in the weeks ahead. 

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