DO NOT Buy an iPhone Through Apple if You Have an AT&T Installment Plan

I have never heard of AT&T accepting a trade in with someone else as obsolving you of your contractual obligation with them. The AT&T next program is essentially a zero interest installment plan and no matter what you do with your device, AT&T expects payment in full if you still have an outstanding balance owed.

When you trade in with AT&T before you have fully paid for the device, AT&T gets the value for the old phone which they use towards the outstanding balance to allow an early upgrade. When you trade it in to Apple for Apple store credit, AT&T gets nothing, and you still have a balance owed to them, either in the form of the traded in old phone, or your cash. So of course they will be coming after you for the balance of what you contracted to pay them.

The lesson here has nothing to do with Apple. It has to do with understanding who you owe and what you owe them whenever you enter into any financing contract, for anything. If you had been under the Apple installment plan and traded your phone in to AT&T before full payment had been made to Apple, Apple would be coming after you for the outstanding balance you would owe them.

Sure, you got a rebate or money from the company you traded the device in with, but were those devices all fully paid for with AT&T at the time you traded them in. If so, then of course you can do that - once you've fulfilled the AT&T next commitment, the device is wholly and legally yours to do anything you want with it. At that point, AT&T could not care less what you do with your own personal property.

But if you still had or have next installment payments due on that device, then AT&T is going to insist you pay those.

Um... Either you didn't communicate clearly the status of your existing phone to the Apple rep who took care of you or you badly misunderstood how things work.

You traded in a device you still owed money to AT&T for. Apple gave you a gift card for it. That does NOT absolve you of your responsibility to pay AT&T what you owe them.

If you use Apple's give back program, that is NOT the same as returning the phone to AT&T so you can get another one on Next. When you do that, you don't get ANYTHING in return for the old phone except to have the remainder of the payments on that device cancelled assuming you actually had it long enough to satisfy the Next agreement.

Best Buy is an authorized AT&T dealer, the reason you were able to upgrade through them is because they had access to your AT&T account and were able to return the phone to AT&T. Your mention of doing this with your iPhone 4s would not qualify in your story as it predates the AT&T Next program. I am assuming the other retailers you dealt with also were AT&T agents.

The Apple Upgrade program came out at about the same time as the phone upgrade plans and is recent. The Apple plan is exclusive to Apple, you can only buy it through Apple it has nothing to do with the phone lease programs that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. have. If your iPhone was paid off via Next you could have traded it in without owing AT&T on your lease. And Apple employees have no idea what your intentions were regarding your lease agreement with AT&T.

Next time read the details of your iPhone purchase. This whole thing has nothing to do with Apple. This is a user error.

This page seems to reference the AT&T Next Every Year conditions that you failed to note before you decided to trade your iPhone in to Apple (and did not choose AT&T):

https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM1009300?gsi=Z1PPN8XM

It sounds like what burned you this time (as opposed to previous times) is that you elected to trade your iPhone 8 Plus while you still owed money on it. Perhaps in your past experiences, you waited a bit longer and had the previous model all paid for.

It was more complicated because you didn’t own the phone to trade in with Apple as you have now found out. What did Apple do wrong? Nothing. You traded something you didn’t own as your carrier is now telling you. Old saying buyer beware!

I’m confused why would Apple need to communicate with your carrier? How would Apple know you had a contact with your carrier? Apple sold you a phone thinking you owned that phone not your carrier.

I think you may need Judge Judy to explain this to you, hopefully many have learnt from your folly. Wishing you the best!