If you purchase an iPhone directly from a carrier, a bricks and mortar outlet or an on-line store, it will be SIM locked so that it can only be used on one specific network. Carriers make an awful lot of money from customers they manage to lock into a contract, and in order to make these contracts appear more attractive, they provide sweeteners as an incentive (by way of a free or very cheap iPhone) to sign on the line. It is common practice for the big cellular network companies to provide their customers with iPhones at massively discounted prices. If that wasn't enough, to make these deals seem even more appealing, Apple have agreed to work with the networks to keep the retail price of a factory unlocked iPhone very high. It is often the case that the discounted handsets the big service providers supply are as much as five times cheaper than their unlocked Apple equivalents.

The idea of being able to get a brand new iPhone for virtually pennies sounds great. The reality might be that a discounted, but locked, iPhone may not be the ideal scenario for you looking towards the future. But imagine you moved to a new home and the network coverage for the provider you are locked to is particularly poor in that area. You can't simply swap carriers, as your handset is locked. If you place an simcard from a different network in your phone, instead of seeing the network name displayed in the top left hand corner of the phone's display, you will be greeted with the dreaded "no service" message instead! The only option for you would be to unlock your iPhone .
unlock iphone
There were once several methods that could be used to unlock an iPhone , but not any more - the old software unlocking method no longer works. Before Apple stopped this method from working, it was