August is when that “should I upgrade?” inner monologue gets loudest, but this is year to get it done for less. Back Market’s back-to-school selection right now includes a 2025 foldable flagship smartphone, a tablet that still runs M2 silicon and pulls full-size creative work, and Apple’s current MacBook Air with M4 under the hood. All three come with a 30-day return window and a one-year warranty. Two of them are in Excellent condition out of the gate. One has a Good-to-Excellent upgrade built in for a mere $15 difference. The case for buying new at full retail price gets weaker every time the Back Market roster looks like this.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 (Unlocked, 256GB, Blue Shadow)
$2,200 new $1,286 (Good) $1,301 (Excellent) Back Market
If the $2,200 full-freight retail price on the Galaxy Z Fold7 is your cue to walk away, Back Market has it at $1,286 in Good condition. Moreover, for $15 more, you can step up to Excellent. If cosmetics matter to you at all, the $15 is worth spending. Either way, you’re looking at a $900-plus discount on a phone that came out this year, in Blue Shadow, unlocked, with dual physical SIM slots plus eSIM.
The hardware case for the Fold7 is a slam dunk. You get an 8.0-inch Foldable Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X display at 1968×2184 resolution when the phone is open, a 200MP main camera, 12GB of RAM, and 5G connectivity across the full unlocked configuration. The phone handles everything from mobile-first productivity tasks to tablet-mode media consumption without needing you to carry a second device to cover you. The cover screen keeps you functional when the phone is closed. The inner display turns it into something closer to a small tablet when you need real estate.
Samsung’s foldable lineup has matured to the point where the hinge anxiety that surrounded earlier generations is largely off the table, and refurbished Fold units go through additional inspection precisely because the mechanism gets scrutinized. At $1,286 versus $2,200 new, the Fold7 in Good or Excellent condition through Back Market is the first time this phone has felt like a reasonable recommendation for people outside the enthusiast tier.
See Galaxy Z fold 7 at Back Market
M2 iPad Pro 11″ 4th Gen (2022, 128GB, Wi-Fi + 5G, Silver)
$999 new $600 Back Market
Four years after it dropped, the 4th Gen iPad Pro is an interesting buy, precisely because the M2 chip inside it still has no business being in a tablet at this price. Back Market has the 11-inch Wi-Fi + 5G configuration in Silver at $600 in Excellent condition, against a regular price of $999. The M2 handles photo editing, video work, creative apps, and split-screen multitasking without strain. The 11-inch Liquid Retina XDR display goes to 2388×1668 at 264 pixels per inch with ProMotion adaptive refresh. The four-speaker audio setup is genuinely good for a device this thin. And the LiDAR scanner, which Apple added to support AR development and computational photography at close range, is still a feature the current non-Pro iPad lineup doesn’t have.
Face ID unlocks it, the rear camera shoots 4K at 60fps, and the front camera handles video calls at 12MP. It runs iPadOS up through iPadOS 18, so software currency isn’t an issue. It supports Apple Pencil (2nd gen and USB-C), which matters if design, note-taking, or annotation work is part of why you’re looking at an iPad in the first place. The cellular configuration here covers Wi-Fi and 5G with a nano SIM, so you’re not chained to a hotspot when you need to work away from a desk. An iPad M2 Pro with cellular for $600 in Excellent condition is clearly a case where the refurbished market is offering a genuinely better deal than the new device market can compete with.
See iPad Pro M2 at Back Market
M4 MacBook Air 13″ (2025, 256GB SSD, 16GB RAM, Midnight)
$999 new $859 Back Market
The M4 MacBook Air is Apple’s current-gen baseline laptop, and at its full retail $999 price it’s a strong buy. At $859 in Excellent condition through Back Market, it moves into truly outstanding deal territory. This is the 10-core M4 processor paired with an 8-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and a 256GB SSD, which is the configuration Apple sells to people who want the Air without the usual 8GB memory tax attached to the entry price. The 16GB baseline here is the sweet spot: 8GB gets constrained faster than most buyers expect.
The Air’s 13-inch Liquid Retina display runs at 2560×1664 with True Tone, IPS technology, and 500 nits of brightness. It’s more than clean enough for color-sensitive work, and sharp enough to eliminate text rendering. The machine weighs under two pounds, charges via MagSafe 3 or either of the two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, and ships with a 1080p front camera and a four-speaker sound system that is audibly better than what you get out of most Windows laptops at any price. There’s no Touch Bar, no ProMotion, and no OLED, but the Air was never meant to check those boxes, and the M4 chip handles everything the Air’s target buyer actually does with a laptop faster than the M3 generation did.
This laptop that makes sense for students, remote workers, and anyone building or rebuilding a Mac setup without wanting to pay new-device prices. $859 in Excellent condition for a current-year M4 MacBook Air is a number worth acting on.
See M4 MacBook Air at Back Market
All three of the above picks come with Back Market’s 30-day return window and a one-year warranty. The Fold7 is available in both Good and Excellent condition, but the $15 gap between them makes it one of the easier decisions in this roundup. Stock at these prices turns over like crazy, so if one of these has spent any time on your wishlist, it’s officially move it or lose it time.