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I know what your thinking, the answer is No! I'm not talking about buying the Chinese knock off which costs like 1,200 birr. I'm talking about the original iphone. At the time of writing this post, i believe the iphone 3GS costs around 3500 birr and the iphone 4 price ranges from 8,000 - 20,000. Lets the drop the argument of 8000 being 'cheap' but compared to spending 20,000, it's as cheap as it gets.
So what kind of iphone 4 costs 8000 and which one costs 20,000.
Unlike Ethiopia, USA and the other countries have many phone carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint... . We on the other hand only have Ethio Telecom (ETC).


An iphone that would work anywhere would cost around 750 US dollars, give or take a 200, depending on the version (16Gb, 32Gb, 64Gb). But Apple (Manufacturer of iphone) sells the iphone to those carriers and those companies give you the iphone for half the price or even sometimes free and ask you to sign a contract with them. What this essentially means is that, if you sign a 2 year contract with a certain carrier, that means you will have to use that carrier for data, calls, internet... for two years. So this carrier company will earn money from you for two years because you are calling people, using internet and other things using your phone. So that is why the carrier company offers you the iphone for a knock down price or even sometimes gives you the phone for free if you promise to sign a longer contract. These type of phone is called a locked or contract phone. (The above proces is the same for all phone manufacturers, we only took Apple or iphone as an example).
The other type of phone is an 'Unlocked Phone' which works anywhere in the world.
So, when people from the US or any other country bring their locked iphones to Ethiopia, it doesn't work because it is locked to a certain carrier. So what people do here is they unlock their iphone using either software or hardware unlock methods which we're not going to discuss right now.
So this is the type of phone you buy for 8,000 - 10,000.
The most common unlock method in Ethiopia is a hardware unlock method which uses a certain tray that goes into the iphone along with our sim cards. This tray activates the iphone to use any kind of sim card. There are some very simple operations done whenever you restart your iphone which take less than 50 seconds. The tray is called a GEVEY Sim but most of the people mobile shops call it Turbo. This turbo has many versions which differ on the type of Sim card supported, the operation done to unlock it everytime and of course, price. So when go to a mobile center and ask for an iphone, either ask for an unlocked iphone or an iphone with turbo. They will know what you're talking about.