Discounted iPhone the unicorn of smartphones
Q. I’m heading to Israel for two years. Any ideas about where to buy an unlocked iPhone for below list price?
A. Smartphones can seem the equivalent of pocket-sized laptops, but they don’t offer the same opportunities for haggling and bargain hunting. A phone’s list price tends to be the price you pay — either upfront, on an installment plan or in the form of higher service fees on the two-year contract required to get the device at a lower upfront cost — until that model gets replaced by a newer version.
That’s certainly the case with iPhones. Unlike MacBooks and iPads, you can’t expect to see them sold at a discount at Apple’s deals site. The Cupertino, Calif., company has occasionally been spotted unloading refurbished iPhones at an eBay storefront, but you can’t count on that either.
Individual wireless carriers will often offer refurbished iPhones for less. But then you also owe at least a month of service, assuming a refurb model only requires signing up for a prepaid plan you can cancel after those first 30 days.
That leaves third-party resellers. Dealnews.com reports that it’s seen the price of an unlocked iPhone 6 with 16 gigabytes of storage holding steady at $610, with better options occasionally surfacing at the eBay storefronts of Monoprice and Roberts Digital.
The site’s features writer Louis Ramirez added that even if Apple does introduce the rumored “iPhone 6s” this fall, you shouldn’t expect additional discounts--maybe $10 off, or a “free” $50 Apple gift card if you pay full price--until November.
The electronics-recycling firm Gazelle, meanwhile, sells refurbished iPhones directly. An unlocked iPhone 6 in “excellent” condition can go for $549 there. You can get a better deal if you buy an iPhone with more memory, judging from the price chart sent along by spokesman Brian Kramer; the $50 premium to go from 16 to 64 GB of storage is half what Apple charges.
You might find it simpler to buy an unlocked iPhone directly from Apple, not least since its online store now clearly identifies the unlocked version instead of calling it a “contract-free” phone.
If you have no need for an unlocked phone at a cut-rate price, you should still contemplate these prices before signing up for the early-upgrade options of AT&T and T-Mobile.
Deals like AT&T’s Next and T-Mobile’s Jump can let you dump last year’s phone for this year’s model at a reasonable price, but they compare poorly to buying a phone outright--meaning it’s unlocked and so can be used with any compatible carrier in the U.S. or abroad--and then selling it when you’re ready for a newer device.
When I last broke down the math, AT&T was slightly better than T-Mobile but neither beat a conservative estimate of the costs involved in buying a phone unlocked and later selling it to a worthy buyer.
Tip: See if your phone will work in select countries
Say you have your unlocked smartphone in hand: Now what? Will it function in the next country you plan to visit?
You can click through your carrier’s international-roaming support pages (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon) to see what sort of data speeds await. Or you can visit an independently-maintained guide, Will My Phone Work, that compiles data from phone manufacturers, wireless carriers and other sources.
Choose your phone’s make and model, pick a country and a carrier, and the site will report which speeds--2G, 3G or LTE--and frequencies are available. You can’t ask for a country-wide compatibility report; site founder Harris Ghafoor, a self-described technology enthusiast in Toronto, is running a crowdfunding campaign to finance adding that and other features.
The results can reveal such surprises as a carrier that offers only 2G or 3G support, something you’ll want to know about before buying a prepaid SIM card for that service.
Ghafoor noted that the official listings often miss some of these details or don’t get revised when software upgrades add support for additional network bands (see, for instance, Motorola’s Droid 4), so he has to update entries in his own database about once a week.
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.