Somewhere in a drawer near you, beneath a tangle of dead Micro-USB chargers and perhaps even an old Argos catalogue, there might be an iPhone 5C. You know the one I mean – plasticky, colourful and very cheerful, perfectly content with its small, dainty build, rounded corners and single rear camera lens. Oh, what a lovely phone it was in its day.
For years, it’s been sitting there doing absolutely nothing. Slowly getting older and more redundant (software support for it ended in 2017), sinking further to the bottom of the drawer and judging you for upgrading to your fancier aluminium and titanium replacements.
Well, it’s back, baby. The little polycarbonate delight is apparently suddenly cool again, with Gen Z fighting over it like it’s a Glastonbury ticket rather than a 13-year-old handset that once struggled to load a single Instagram picture without a small prayer.
What the numbers say
According to eBay data, searches for the iPhone 5C rose by 164 per cent between January 2025 and January 2026. The average UK sale price, meanwhile, climbed by 55 per cent during the same period. It’s not just the phone in general that’s seen search increases, though – turns out some colours are more popular than others.
According to the email we received, white searches were up 450 per cent, with pink following closely behind at 433 per cent. Yellow added 50 per cent, it was claimed, while blue crept up by 18 per cent. Poor little green was left out of the email, so presumably you can leave that one in your drawer.
As mentioned, the driving force behind all this searching is apparently Gen Z, despite some being mere toddlers when the iPhone 5C launched. Still, this is a generation raised on smartphones so similar to each other that it’s no wonder they are searching for a little fun. Ironically finding it in an iPhone their older siblings would likely have bullied them for not being a “proper” iPhone, but that’s besides the point.
Who needs a flagship phone costing upwards of $1,000 with more AI features than you know what to do with, when you can get a colourful iPhone 5C, largely made of the same material as a lunchbox, to keep you happy? No Face ID, no LiDAR sensor, no Siri AI to summarise your holiday photos. Just a 4-inch screen, a home button with no fingerprint reader in sight, and a build small enough to fit in your pocket.
What it could mean for you
There will no doubt be many sat there, anticipating the launch of Apple’s first folding phone, widely reported to be announced at its 9 September event alongside the new iPhone 18 Pro models, and expected to cost more than some second-hand cars. But there are others trawling sites like eBay in search of their latest nostalgia hit, and in this case, a phone with anything but AI features, certainly no folding screen, and not so much as a glimmer of a telephoto camera.
So what does it mean for you? If you’re a hoarder of retro tech and you’ve got an iPhone 5C languishing somewhere, especially in white, pink or yellow, it might be time to dust it off and make some space in your tech drawer. At the time of writing, green, yellow and blue-sealed models were listed at £595 on eBay’s UK site, while a pink model was going for $669 on eBay’s US site.
Given that the iPhone 5C launched at $549/£469 for the 16GB model, you’d at least make your money back (if you’ve never used it anyway) – not bad for a device that’s spent the last several years doing a fine impression of a paperweight. That $500/£500-plus might even cover a quarter of what the folding iPhone could cost. Either way, one of the best tech investments you could have made in 2013 wasn’t just shares in Nvidia, but never opening or using your iPhone 5C and keeping it for a moment just like this.
Read more: The iPhone Fold will be a must for Apple diehards, but I’ll only buy one if it has these 6 essential features
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