I think this is the case with t-mobile, but I've always heard that if
you get the at&t version of the phone, even at the apple store for full
price, it's still locked to at&t which makes paying full price forthe
phone pointless. When I got the iphone 5 from an apple store, there
were separate phones that were specificly unlocked. I'm not sure if
there is a difference with the CDMA version, or if it's all the same
hardware, but whether an iphone is locked is actually determined by how
Apple has it labeled in their servers. I'm not sure why Apple would be
concerned about it, if people are paying full price for an unlocked
phone, it should not matter to them, on the other hand, carriers do
have too much control over things at least in the states. I think in
Europe, there are more restrictions on what carriers can and cannot do,
and hopefully eventually that will happen here as well.
Original message:
This is correct. In the US, you now have several options for buying an
unlocked phone:
1) Buy the t-mobile, device only phone on apple.com. You'll pay the
full price, and it will come with a t-mobile sim already., but it's
fully unlocked and you can use whatever sim you want with it.
2) Go to an Apple store and buy, device only at full/unsubsidized
price, either the AT&T phone or the Tmobile one.
You can also buy the Verizon model at full price, device only, from an
Apple store in the US. The advantage is that you have access to the
CDMA bands in addition to the GSM bands. However, I'm not sure if you
must activate the phone on Verizon before you can use it.
Again, if you buy device only from Apple, your phone is unlocked. If
you buy from a phone carrier, even at full price, your phone will be
locked.
Apple really doesn't advertise this stuff, probably because of
agreements with carriers, the general public not knowing/caring what
unlocked means, and to prevent people from buying tons of device only
AT&T/Tmobile phones from Apple stores and selling them overseas.
Brice
On 9/23/13, Sieghard Weitzel <siegh...@live.ca> wrote:
They are also always available in Canada right from day 1. I can say this
for sure because I preordered my unlocked 4S 2 years ago and just bought an
unlocked 5S 64 Gb on Friday.
Now, I exchanged a few messages with a gentleman named Brice last week who
I
believe was from North or South Carolina and I could swear that he told me
he had ordered an unlocked 5S Gold from Apple.
Regards,
Sieghard
-----Original Message-----
From: viphone@googlegroups.com [mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of Mike Arrigo
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2013 7:11 AM
To: viphone@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: no unlocked 5s when ordering from the Apple Store
For some reason, the unlocked version of the phones does not appear until a
month or 2 later. That's kind of surprising since they are definitely made,
they are already available in Europe. You could probably get one from ebay
but you may end up paying more for it.
Original message:
I didn't rush to order the 5s this time. But, rather, finding that
none of my family members would want my 4S, I decided to hold off a
bit, and maybe even go to the Apple Store or AT&T store in person to
see if I would get some sort of trade-in value for my old phone.
But, just for the fun of it, I decided to go online last night and
check the Apple Store here in the United States. And, when I did, I
saw that one is still able to purchase and unlocked 5c, but not an
unlocked 5s. Oh, well, I probably would have purchased from my
carrier, anyway, but was thinking they might offer the unlocked 5s for
those who wanted it right away.
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