The Cincinnati Junk Drawer Index
Everyone has the drawer. Tangled cables, a dead remote, two old phones you meant to do something about, a watch that stopped getting updates. It sits there for years because clearing it out never feels urgent and nobody knows what any of it is worth.
So we added it up. These are our own buyback prices, the same numbers published on our sell pages — not estimates, not "up to" figures.
One drawer, five devices
| Device | What we pay |
|---|---|
| iPhone 12 · 128GB | $116 |
| iPad Air 4 · 256GB | $101 |
| iPhone 11 · 64GB | $94 |
| iPhone XR · 64GB | $68 |
| Apple Watch Series 6 · 40mm | $45 |
| Total | $424 |
Four hundred and twenty-four dollars, sitting in a drawer, losing value every month.
Why the number keeps falling
A used phone does not hold its price the way a car does. It drops hardest in the first two years, then keeps sliding as Apple and Samsung stop shipping updates for it. The iPhone XR in that list was a $749 phone at launch. It is $68 now, and in a year it will be less.
That is the actual cost of waiting. Not a dramatic loss in any single month — just a steady leak, on a device you are not using anyway.
Condition matters less than people expect
The most common reason people leave a phone in the drawer is that they assume it is worthless. Usually it isn't:
- Cracked screen? Still worth money. We repair it ourselves, so we are not deducting a retail repair bill from your offer.
- Won't turn on? Often a battery or charging port, both cheap fixes on our bench. Broken phones still have a price.
- Old and slow? Slow usually means a tired battery, not a dead phone.
- Still locked to a carrier? It pays less than unlocked, but it still pays.
The only devices that genuinely come out near zero are ones with activation lock we cannot clear, or water damage deep enough to kill the board.
What to do with your drawer this week
- Empty it onto the table. Phones, tablets, watches, laptops, game consoles — all of it counts.
- Check prices before you leave the house. Our sell pages show what we pay per model and storage size. Several devices? The lot calculator totals the whole batch at once.
- Sign out of iCloud and Google. This is the one step that actually matters — we cannot buy a device that is still locked to your account.
- Bring it in. 7712 Montgomery Rd, Unit I. No appointment. We test in front of you and pay on the spot.
A fair warning about the number
$424 is one plausible drawer, not a promise about yours. Your total depends on exactly which models you have, their storage, their condition and whether they are carrier-locked. Prices also move with the market — they are refreshed regularly, and a quote is good on the day you get it.
What we can say is that the drawer is almost never worth nothing, and that it is worth more today than it will be next spring.