X

iPad trade-ins for cash leap 1,000 percent, says swap site

Apple releases a fourth-generation iPad, and the number of trades rockets on trade-in site NextWorth, with more than half those swaps involving the suddenly dated third-gen iPad.

Donna Tam Staff Writer / News
Donna Tam covers Amazon and other fun stuff for CNET News. She is a San Francisco native who enjoys feasting, merrymaking, checking her Gmail and reading her Kindle.
Donna Tam
James Martin/CNET

Here's one way to recover from Apple's lightning-speed product cycle -- trade in your now "obsolete" third-gen iPad for some cash.

Trade-in site NextWorth said it saw a 1,015 percent increase in iPad trade-ins yesterday after Apple's announcement of a new iPad. The company didn't say how many total iPads that jump amounts to, but it wouldn't be a surprise if a lot of burned Apple owners ran to a trade-in site following the news. The new device comes just seven months after the third-generation device's release.

A similar spurt of activity happened on another swap site, Gazelle.com, and the company said trade-ins jumped 700 percent today, a 450 percent increase from yesterday when the Apple news hit. At Gazelle, 70 percent of the trade-ins were for third-generation iPads.

Most of the trades on NextWorth yesterday -- 66 percent, according to the company -- were also for the third-gen iPads. Twenty-eight percent were for iPad 2 tablets and 6 percent were for the original iPad.

NextWorth's promotion to give customers an extra 10 percent on any iPod or iPad may have added to the increase.

Update, 12:25 p.m. PT: Updated with numbers from Gazelle.com.