Where to get the best deal on a refurbished iPhone

Apple’s iPhone line is, without doubt, its most important product. While there’s a lot to like about iPads, MacBooks and Apple Watches, the iPhone lies at the core of the modern Apple ecosystem.

However, Apple does position itself as a luxury brand, and that means picking up a brand-new iPhone can be a painfully expensive experience. Apple simply doesn’t do “cheap”, with even its lower-tier iPhone SE range sitting at a price point that’s high mid-range for Android handsets.

So what’s an Apple fan to do if you want or need an iPhone on a limited budget? One option is to look to the second-hand market, where “refurbished” iPhones are available most of the time. That’s not surprising; sales figures suggest that Apple’s iPhone line sells well locally, which means there’s always plenty of second-hand stock to be had, and that’s led to a quite wide market for refurbished second-hand iPhones.

When you get a brand-spanking-new iPhone fresh out of the box, it’s in (or should be in) perfect condition. A few years down the track, maybe it’s a little less so. Actually, there’s no maybe about it; even if you’ve given it the most gentle experience possible with a thick protective case and only used it to upload cat memes to social media once a week (we won’t judge, we promise!), there’s going to be wear and tear on the screen and particularly on the battery. 

Naturally, if you’ve used your iPhone a bit more than that, it may have bumps and scratches on the casing, cracks on the screen or dust or detritus in the speakers, maybe the risk of some water ingress… you get the picture.

Just buying a second-hand iPhone involves taking on the risk of any or all of those issues, but in theory, a refurbished phone has been checked to some degree to cover off on some or all of those potential faults. The screen may have been replaced, for some models touchID sensors may have been fixed up, and the battery may have been refreshed to give it a little more service life. 

What commonly happens with a refurbished phone is that it’s given a grade by the company that’s selling you the phone. An “A” grade phone should (in theory) be nearly as good as new, while B or C grade phones may have some imperfections in play, typically more around how the case looks than anything else.

The important factor to bear in mind here when shopping for a refurbished iPhone is that the grades don’t actually have a standard they need to work towards. They’re not entirely meaningless – an A graded phone should be in better condition than a C graded one – but there’s no absolute standard that each refurbisher works towards to award those grades, and as such the choice of grade is very much up to the company that’s selling you the handset in each case.

2022’s iPhone 14 line saw Apple drop the Mini in favour of the iPhone 14 Plus, alongside the more plain-jane iPhone 14, while on the Pro side of the fence, Apple finally jumped up its camera megapixel count, making it a quite desirable model for photo fanatics. As a newer iPhone, however, there’s typically less refurbished stock out there – and prices are a touch higher as a result.

2021’s iPhone family included the last of the iPhone mini lineup if you genuinely prefer a smaller iPhone, alongside the regular iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max models.  For the regular iPhones it was a case of gentle improvement in battery life, while the Pro models were the first to see 120Hz screen refresh rates, or “ProMotion” in AppleSpeak. 

Apple’s iPhone 12 family dates back to 2020, and it’s arguably the sweet spot right now for refurbished iPhone models. Why?

While it doesn’t quite have the fancy trappings of an iPhone 15, you do get a lot of good quality of life improvements such as MagSafe charging, 5G compatibility and the choice between regular and mini models of the phone in the regular series. Critically, though, they’re old enough that the discounts on refurbished models can make a big difference to your bank balance, while still being new enough that they’re likely to get iOS updates for a reasonable length of time. Dipping further back into the history of iPhones, while still including models that will get updates this year, runs the very real risk of becoming obsolete a whole lot faster.

The iPhone SE has, since its inception, been Apple’s lower-cost iPhone alternative, built essentially around the chassis of the iPhone 8. There’s a big challenge when buying a refurbished iPhone SE, however, because unlike Apple’s other iPhone lines, there’s not just the one of them. There are three generations of iPhone products that can be called the “iPhone SE”, from 2016’s Apple A9-based iPhone SE, through 2020’s iPhone SE based on the A13 platform, and then 2022’s iPhone SE, which runs on an A15 bionic platform.

As you might expect, that means the performance and features of the 2016 model are quite a bit different to that of the 2022 variant, so the key factor here when buying a refurb is to make sure you’re getting the iPhone SE that you expect. We’d argue strongly that the 2022 model is the one to go for, maybe the 2020 if it’s suitably cheap enough – though given this was already Apple’s “low cost” iPhone, the margins there are slim for resellers, so it’s also worth checking prices against what an actually-new iPhone SE might cost you.

They’ve been superseded many times over now, but we reckon the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro are some of the best phones Apple has ever produced. And the good news is that you can still nab a refurbished iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 Pro outright through sellers like Amazon and Kogan. Each retailer has its own refurbishing process and guarantees, so be sure to check the fine print before hitting ‘Buy Now’.

Here are the best offers below.

Released across 2017 and 2018, the iPhone X, XR and XS are getting on in age. That doesn't mean they aren't still great smartphones—their cameras and processors still pack a punch even today—but you do make a few compromises when opting for an iPhone released in 2018 or earlier. First of all, you'll be restricted to 4G (that was introduced with iPhone 12,) but more importantly, older phones are only supported for so long by Apple. The iPhone X has already reached its end of life and the iPhone XS and XR aren't far off either.

Still, if you're simply looking for the cheapest iPhone to last you long enough until you're ready to upgrade to the latest and greatest, you can still find some stellar deals on refurbished iPhone X models.

Like the iPhone X range above, the ever-popular iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are a few years old now, but they still give some more modern phones a run for their money—especially considering how much of that money you can actually save by buying an already cheaper model with that sweet, sweet refurb discount.

Besides the iPhone 7, which we wouldn't recommend at this stage, the iPhone 8 is the next cheapest iPhone you can get with a refurbished discount. But the 2017 smartphone comes with the same disclaimer as the X range—Apple no longer supports it.

If you want a cheaper iPhone but need to split the payments up with a contract plan in the same way that you could for a genuinely new iPhone, you do have a couple of options in play.

If your network of preference is Telstra, numobile offers refurbished iPhones on contract terms, though there is a significant catch here. You don’t have to pay for the phone upfront, but you’re actually only leasing it, with handsets needing to be returned at the end of a 24 month period to avoid a penalty fee.

If TPG/Vodafone’s network is more your style, Kogan Mobile offers either subscription pricing – similar to numobile’s leased phones, with the need to return the phone after your 24 month term is up – or “own and pay” pricing that’s slightly higher for iPhones, but with the phone ending up being yours once it’s paid off. If you take up a Kogan Mobile SIM at the same time as you get your iPhone, Kogan Mobile will give you the first month’s access for free.

One of the real benefits of buying a refurbished iPhone outright (or, indeed, any phone) is that you own it and have the flexibility to pick and choose from the very best SIM-only deals to go with it.

Buying a refurbished iPhone is all about making the most of your money, so it’s worth matching it up with a great value mobile plan. Here’s our pick of plans with at least 20GB of data to use with your refurbished iPhone every month: