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iPhone 4 actual price?

A

AJ.G

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 26, 2010
99
0
Beijing.
so i have an old nokia phone, a dumb phone,
and i was thinking about buyin an ipad, then i'd have the ios at home,
and phone on the go. problem is i already have an itouch.
im selling it to a friend, and i was thinking if im not going to have an itouch,
might aswell just get an iphone 4. cheaper than an ipad....

or so i thought.
i always thought the iphone was 200USD, and that was it.
then i realised you have to get an ATT contract.
i live in china, so its with china unicom,
but my sim card is china mobile... that doesnt matter.
so i want to buy an iphone in the US, (or get my friend to buy one)
and then set it up with a chinese sim card.

but does that mean when my friend (if he deos) buys it in america,
will have to have an ATT contract aswell with the iphone?
which will then make the iphone like 600 or something USD?

HOW MUCH IS AN IPHONE IN THE USA,
if possible WITHOUT ATT contract,

cuz in china its a whopping 5000 RMB for when it comes (in three days) to the apple store,
and that seems ridiculously overpriced to me.
sorry for the long post,
and thanks for any replies:)
 
in US it's 600USD but that is still locked to at&t and that is without any local sales tax that you will have to pay.

also new iphones come with 4.1 now which cannot be jailbroaken or unlocked so you wouldn't actually be able to use it a local network.

another option is to buy it from a country that has unlocked iphones like the UK, in the UK the iphone is £499 BUT 5000RBM is only £476 so it is actually cheeper to buy it from china than it would be to import it (or pay the blackmarket mark up from a UK import (which is upto £400!)

and remember that any imported one would have no warrenty as the warrenty is only valid in the country bought.

so all in all I would just buy one from your own country as it works out the best option
 
androiphone said:
and remember that any imported one would have no warrenty as the warrenty is only valid in the country bought.

so all in all I would just buy one from your own country as it works out the best option
Click to expand...

Actually they just changed that. The iPhone's warranty is now international.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Phone prices advertised in the US and some other countries are usually subsidized prices. That is, the real retail price ($600-$700) has been subsidized by the cell carrier in exchange for a 2 year contract. (Canada and (corrected, NOT UK) sometimes have 3 year contracts!)

So your friend "could" get you an iPhone for only $199, but he would have to sign a 2-year contract to get it at that price. If he cancels the service early, he'll owe an "early termination penalty" ($300 or something similar).

As another poster already mentioned, the phone will be locked to AT&T, and an unlock isn't yet available for iOS 4.1.

My suggestion is to find an unlocked iPhone in China (if available) or internationally. Yes, you'll be paying the unsubsidized price, but it will be much simpler.

Just FYI, buying phones with "subsidized" prices usually means your service costs will be expensive (compared to other areas of the world where people usually pay the full price for the unlocked & unsubsidized handset, then have MUCH less expensive service). My point is that "all that glitters isn't gold".

Sean
 
TruckdriverSean said:
Phone prices advertised in the US and some other countries are usually subsidized prices. That is, the real retail price ($600-$700) has been subsidized by the cell carrier in exchange for a 2 year contract. (Canada and UK sometimes have 3 year contracts!)

Sean
Click to expand...

There are no 3 year contracts in the UK. Most of the major networks (O2, Vodafone, Orange, Three) do 18 or 24 month contracts and others like Tesco do 12 months.

To the OP - why dont you just buy the phone from Apple online in Hong Kong? Thats about as cheap as you will get - no contract and will be SIM free. Buying it in the US means you still need to jailbreak it to unlock it and the firmware it probably has on it right now in unjailbreakable.
 
OMGitsShan said:
To the OP - why dont you just buy the phone from Apple online in Hong Kong? Thats about as cheap as you will get - no contract and will be SIM free. Buying it in the US means you still need to jailbreak it to unlock it and the firmware it probably has on it right now in unjailbreakable.
Click to expand...

THAT is an extremely good idea,
that didnt cross my mind for some weird reason.
yes HK is extremely cheap, only 4300 RMB,
you said no contract? thats interesting...
thanks for all the replies guys.

very helpful:)
 
the actual price of the iphone is not consistent. apple made the pricing of it that way so that different countries cannot make comparisons.
 
AJ.G said:
THAT is an extremely good idea,
that didnt cross my mind for some weird reason.
yes HK is extremely cheap, only 4300 RMB,
you said no contract? thats interesting...
thanks for all the replies guys.

very helpful:)
Click to expand...

You'll have to find a middleman though as the HK Apple Store does not ship outside hk.
 
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