Apple appears to have made a significant change at some point to how some standalone (not with a purchase or upgrade!) iPhone trade-ins work. I haven't seen this covered elsewhere. It used to be that Apple would either automatically send a trade-in kit or you could easily request it by clicking a button. Now, Apple says that if you want the kit, you have to call customer support to specifically request it. Apple won't even provide it via iMessage support, you literally have to get on the phone and wait on hold if you want the kit. That's some egregious dark pattern nonsense, like trying to cancel a newspaper subscription. They're just intentionally making it more difficult to use this convenient option.

Edit: per the discussion below, it looks like this policy change applies to some (but not all) standalone trade-ins for Apple credit that you can use later, and not to other kinds of trade-ins (e.g., credit against a purchase that you're making at the same time or an upgrade). It also might only apply to certain types of devices. Updated the text above to reflect that. Still bad!

Edit 2: I don't quite understand why this is getting downvoted to oblivion. It's a real and user-hostile policy decision by Apple! Folks below confirm that they've had the same experience.

"In addition to the changed values, Apple has stopped accepting 12-inch MacBook trade-ins."

Wanting to do this trade-in with Costco instead of Apple because Costco has better deals on the MacBook I want. I know Apple trade in is more, but the MacBook is so much cheaper at Costco that the net savings is greater this way. Never even heard of Phobio and Costco's trade-in so just looking for experiences.

Has this happened to anyone else? I’m completely furious. I had a perfectly fine iMac which was about five years old that I just decided to trade in to upgrade. It was supposed to be $500 for the trade-in. About a week later I got a “revised” trade-in for zero dollars, and there were pictures of my destroyed computer.

When I called to follow up, they said that “their investigation was correct” and that there was no damage to the box and this is the way the computer arrived, which is impossible. They don’t have any pictures of the box and there was no damage supposedly reported, but the computer that I sent them was in perfect condition. Apparently they’re sending the computer in the picture back to me. Supposedly it works, but it’s destroyed. Now I’m out to trade-in money and I’m also out of computer.

The only thing that I can think of is that somebody opened the box and either destroyed it or dropped it and closed up the box, FedEx put it in a new box, or someone at Apple screwed up and didn’t report the damaged box.