Sell your broken
iPhone 12 mini.
Even with nothing on the screen at all, a 64 GB is £5. That is 26 per cent of the working price rather than the nothing you may have been expecting. Nobody is going to retire on that. It is still more than the nothing you are offered everywhere that treats a broken screen as the end of the conversation.
Condition
What counts as Picture fine
- ✓Original screen, picture perfect
- ✓Touch works everywhere on the screen
- ✓Front or back glass cracked or smashed
- ✓A dent, a broken camera or speaker, Face ID not working
- ✓Any battery health
- ✗Lines, bleeding, blank patches or dead touch: Faulty, screen broken
- ✗A replacement screen, however good: Faulty, screen broken
- ✗Will not switch on or charge: we cannot buy it
Our bench checks every phone against the grade you chose. If it does not match, you get a revised price to accept or decline, with a free return either way.
Storage
- Paid by bank transfer within 48 hours of it arriving, Monday to Friday
- Post it today at any Post Office, no pack needed
- Price locked for 10 days once you order
- Change your mind after our check? We send it back free
- Read our reviews on Trustpilot
What the damage costs you
Three figures, and the gaps between them are the point. £19 if it is perfect. £18 once the front glass has gone but the display under it still draws a clean image, a drop of £1. £5 once the image itself is wrong, which is £14 off the top. Cracked glass over a working picture is close to free here, which is not true at most places you could send it.
The 64 GB is the smallest this phone was sold in and these are its prices, so nothing above can catch you out. On an OLED a failing panel shows as a dark blotch, a burnt in shadow of the keyboard, or a line of pixels that has simply stopped. Unsure? The lower grade is the safe answer, because we revise upwards without being asked and downwards only in writing. Our three grades, explained properly.
Where the iPhone 12 mini sits
That makes the iPhone 12 mini less than most of the phones we buy. Every other model we buy holds a larger share.
Run the same sum over all 32 of them and a shape appears. Under £50 working, a faulty picture leaves about 41 per cent. At £120 and up it leaves about 57 per cent. The panel has nothing to do with it; the price of the phone has everything to do with it.
The reason is not the screen, it is the sums. A display, a test, an erase and a dispatch cost about the same on any phone at all, and against what an iPhone 12 mini fetches those fixed costs are a large share. The cheaper the phone, the less of it survives the damage.
Worth knowing before you send it
The battery. The 12 mini has the smallest battery of any iPhone of its era, and a small battery does more full charge cycles per year than a big one, so it ages faster in real use than the calendar suggests.
Behind the back glass of a 12 mini is a ring of MagSafe magnets around the charging coil, which makes the back easy to test even when it is cracked. Hold a MagSafe charger or wallet near the centre: it should pull itself into place and, with the charger, start charging. One that will not grip or will not charge is worth putting in your description. The front cover is Ceramic Shield, which arrived with this generation, and Night mode works on every camera here, front, wide and ultra wide alike, so a quick photo in a dim room from each tells you all three still see. A purple 5.4 inch phone can only be a 12 mini: Apple added purple to the 12 and 12 mini in April 2021, and no 13 mini was made in it.
Sure it is this one?
5.4 inches, flat sides, and two rear cameras stacked one directly above the other. The 13 mini is the same size but its two lenses sit diagonally. That angle is the whole visible difference between the two.
Every size, broken
Picture gone, this model runs 64 GB £5, 128 GB £9 and 256 GB £9.
Cracked with the picture good, 64 GB £18, 128 GB £18 and 256 GB £18.
The iPhone 12 mini in one paragraph
One of only two mini iPhones Apple ever made, which is why there are not many of them about.
What happens to a broken one here
At this age it goes one of two ways, decided at the bench rather than in advance. Sound underneath, it gets a screen and becomes somebody's next phone. Not sound, and the board, the cameras and the housing go on the parts shelf for the ones that are.
Free tracked postage, checked within a working day, paid within 48 hours of it arriving, and erased to recognised standards with the record kept.
Questions about broken phones, from wiping one you cannot unlock to what happens if we disagree with your grade, are answered on the broken iPhone page. The whole of this model, working or not, is on the iPhone 12 mini page. Still deciding? Selling an iPhone with Face ID not working: yes, and here is how.
Broken iPhones either side of this one
The share beside each name is what that model keeps. Notice how little the panel has to do with the order.