It was pretty painless. We got it there to get the Rose Gold color she wanted, to get the 32 GB version, and to not have to deal with the Verizon people.

She got $70 for her old 5S which made her happy. (vs. the $61 that Verizon was offering.) The 5S worked well enough that they didn't say it was too broken to get anything for it, but it was touch and go. She had to log into her Apple account to approve wiping it, and the text entry box kept closing and opening as she typed in the characters. But the guy didn't care at that point (he had already approved the $70). Eventually she got it done.

While we were there, a young woman was wanting to trade in her iPhone 6 for a 6S with 128 GB and her Apple guy said she would only get $135 for it (and kinda recommended that she sell it elsewhere). So $70 really wasn't that bad, relatively anyway.

We decided it just didn't seem worth it to get a "new" one from eBay for the same price or off Swappa for maybe $25 less, and have any potential issues with it and have to fight with Joe's Garage and iPhone Emporium's return policies and the like.

Restoring from the local iTunes backup was a bit scary - it initially said there wasn't a compatible backup for it. Then iTunes downloaded some update to the SE, and updated the firmware, and then iTunes acted the way it was supposed to and updated and restored the backup just fine.

We haven't done anything with Verizon yet (nothing on the Verizon web page), so we'll have to see if she gets billed the $30 activation fee or not.

We've got 60 days to decide whether to get AppleCare or not. We'll probably skip it.

So far, so good.

Cheers,
Scott.