Shopping For A Used iPhone 6 | Silicon Valley Living

How I Setup My iPhone For The First Time

I’ve been using a smart phone for a few months now, and the ApplePay seems to be a great feature which stimulate me to get an iPhone 6 (iPhone 5s don’t have the hardware capability). Spending $650 + tax for a brand new 16GB and $750 for a 64GB is a little too expensive for my practical sense. So, I’ve been looking on Craigslist for a used one with a great discount, and it’s NOT easy. Most of the iPhone 6 for sale only have about 6 months left of the warranty which is 1/2 life of the phone, but the owners still want premium prices for them. Average asking price on the 64GB is about $650 which is only $100 less from a brand new one. I don’t believe they can sell them, but they still post on Craigslist because it’s free. My goal for getting the phones are: $200 less than the original price from Apple website with at least 6 months of warranty left: $450 for 16GB and $550 for 64GB. I don’t really need 128GB or the big fat “PLUS”. I believe iPhone users are totally well off, or may be not. I couldn’t believe people are walking around with almost $1000 phone. I can afford to get the iPhone 6, but I can’t imagine myself carrying a $700-900 phone around. Yes, the quality is great, but at the end of the day, it’s still a phone. Well, if you want to play, you got to pay…

There are only 1 thing I can do with bad phones:

1. Blacklisted iPhones: If iCloud is NOT locked – I can buy for my son to use as iPod Touch for the same price as an iPod Touch 5.

2. iCloud locked: It’s dead, can’t use as anything, unless I find the owner and ask to pay for his/her username and password. Even to find the owner username = email to contact in the phone is tricky.

There are tons of stolen/reported stolen iPhones for sale on Craigslist. The best is to prevent yourself from getting a blacklisted, iCloud locked ones, by avoiding all the low priced ads.

The amazing thing is many iPhone users don’t even know how to lock the phone with iCloud. Some don’t even have Apple Ids.

I found an iPhone 6, 64GB unlocked (means the phone will work with any carrier: At&t, Verizon, T-mobile, Crickets…), retailed $750 for $550. The phone’s IMEI number checked out with Apple website on both warranty and iCloud, but the blacklist wasn’t so clean.

The owner doesn’t have any records of purchasing the phone even though he’s the original owner.

So, what does blacklisted IMEI mean? It is not usable on the carrier that blacklisted the phone. The blacklisted phone means the owner reported the phone was stolen or has not paid off for the phone or the balance owed the carrier. Some people bought the phone and activated GOOD with a different carrier until the blacklisted goes nation wide to all carriers then the phone stops working (from information I read on the internet). So, even the phone was offered less, but I didn’t want to take a chance. Someone else did. May be he/she didn’t care about the Cricket blacklisted carrier.

Most of the time, when I asked the owner to provide the IMEI, they stop communicating. The legitimate ones gave me the IMEI number without any problems, and with those, it would check out very nicely.

Even though the phone is checked out perfectly, I heard story that after the sale and activation, the owner can still reported stolen and it becomes blacklisted. The best is to meet the seller at the carrier, let them check out everything for you, activated, reset the phone to original settings before handing over the money. If possible, to get the bill of sale from the seller if he/she is the original owner. It’s a lot of work and risks to try to save a few hundreds… Some owners even discounted very little which not worth the risks.

Finally I found a brand new iPhone 6 64GB for $600.

I checked the ads every day and I found an ads that seemed reasonable and real. It really came out very nicely. The person posted a picture of the box with the serial & imei number for everyone to check, which is nice.

We met at a T-Mobile store and the phone did come with the sim and the lady checked out and turn on the phone for me in a few minutes. The amazing thing is the phone was given as a gift at Christmas, but the warranty actually starts at the time I activated the phone. Now the phone warranty is a year from today. Now, I lock the phone with my iCloud.