Just paid £97 for unlock wow!

[mrphil]

Swapped iphone 5 at apple under warranty thinking of be smart and get a sim free one!
boy was I wrong!

locked to EE, and not willing to wait 6 months I've took drastic action and paid £97 for a unlock seeing as it's the most expensive network to unlock.

how do these companies actually get on to the orange servers to update apple?
I paid via credit card so worse case can claim back!

[flumperino]

Cor blimey!! You could buy a half decent smartphone for that!

[reverend]

Just had similar with Vodafone mate - ended up paying 20 quid to unlock and shut the account down early as it would have cost me more to leave the contract running another month so they'd unlock it for free!

[mrphil]

7-8 day lead been told , really busy which is understandable with the 5c and 5s!

[evilsatan]

iPhone 5 is £95 through the methods me and mobileman use, even older models are £85!! Ridiculous prices, not sure why they vary so much.

[burner1]

I know they are looking at Apple over it's bespoke charging port design and I wish they would sort out the extortion of unlocking as well for all phones. If you sign up to a contract but want to use another sim, I can't see the problem... if you want to leave the contract early, then pay the remaining time as normal.

[reverend]

Yeah it's bonkers. Vodafone refused to do mine as they said the IMEI didn't match as I'd had the handset swapped out at Apple.

Their customer services said to email the receipt for the work from Apple to the NUC team and they'd sorted it - that resulted in them saying they wouldn't do it, customer services saying that they'd updated the IMEI and then getting caught in ping pong between the two teams for a month.

It's ridiculous really, guess they must have high theft rates etc but there must be an easier way as iPhones aren't even that heavily subsidised by the networks these days as they just hitch up the price of the contract.

[macmilm]

Legal theft imho !!!!! Apple especially.. but all of em are pretty shitty when it comes to unlocking !!

[mrphil]

Still not bad as from originally having a iphone5 for free then getting done for 179 for water damage to swapping for an s4 to swapping for another iphone and swapping it out for a new one under warranty and paying 97 to unlock so all in all 280 for a iphone 5, not bad!

[reverend]

I'm not sure if it's Apple deciding the unlock charges though as they're all so different so had assumed it was the network?!

[macmilm]

I'm not sure if it's Apple deciding the unlock charges though as they're all so different so had assumed it was the network?!

I think your right but they are taking the royal piss !!!!!!

[evilsatan]

It is the network.

With Voda your IMEI has to be assigned to your account, you can get a PAYG Voda sim with a bit of credit on, put it in the phone and leave on, make a chargeable call on it and after 24-48 hours of it being on it should link. Then you can call and pay the £20 fee for the unlock.

[Mobileman]

so you didnt listen to my advice as i said on other thread unlucky theres a reason why EE and 3 handsets are cheaper as they so fooking expensive to unlock, suppose not too bad but you could have latched that imei to an account if it was out of contract and paid the £20 would have had to have been in a working orange contract sim for 24-48 hours

PS i pay £73 on i5 orange unlocks and im not getting a great price so you've been mugged, where was it ?, they are all basically done back door to apple servers

[Mobileman]

Networks set there own prices for unlocks, 3rd party factory unlock is decided by the reseller volumes and if they have access to a true direct source (approx 12 in world but less for EE and three hence higher price)

[Mobileman]

7-8 day lead been told , really busy which is understandable with the 5c and 5s!

its because they batch there orders up and then get a bulk price so 150 unlocks for a better rate, also takes apple 24 - 48 hours to update the servers worldwide to register the unlock

[evilsatan]

I must have checked a different source :/ or I read 5c/s as i5 lol

[bbshark]

yep ee/orange/tmobile are the worst for getting unlocked and thats why they are so cheap. was even a pain in th earse to get mine done off them after having it on contract for 2 years. because i got it from CPW they said they wasnt going to unlock it and it was down to CPW to do so. day after at a different time i rang again and explained it to the person on the phone and he said dont worry ill sort it out for you. couple of weeks later i put another sim in and it was done.

moved from orange now and wont be going back.

[evilsatan]

On the bright side, at least its legal to unlock over here unlike the bs in America. Especially as ultrasn0w hasn't been updated in so long.