How to Check if iPhone is New, Refurbished, or Replacement

How to Check if iPhone is New, Refurbished, or Replacement

If youre buying a used iPhone or repairing an iPhone, you may wonder if you can find out if the iPhone was bought as new, is a refurbished model, or is a replacement device provided by Apple via a service request. Wonder no more, you can use an interesting device model identifier trick to discover if an iPhone is new, refurbished, a replacement, or even personalized by engraving. This can be helpful information for buyers of used devices, if youve received a device as a gift or hand-me-down, if youre troubleshooting or repairing an iPhone, and more. You can decipher the device model prefix to determine the original status of an iPhone (and probably an iPad too) device, heres how: Thats all there is to it, now you know how to determine if an iPhone is new, referred, replaced, or other. Its possible there are some other identifier prefixes for iPhone devices that arent listed here, if you know of any do share them in the comments. I have tested this with a handful of my own iPhone devices that I know are either new, refurbished, or replacements, and it has held up. I havent personally seen the P identifier however. By the way, its important to note the model identifier shown here (like MN572LL/A) is different from the general (like iPhone X) and (like A1822) admittedly a bit confusing since they all have similar labels, but they are indeed entirely different things. You can use similar tricks to sort out some details about iPhone devices by and then too. Thanks to a helpful on the Apple Discussion forums for this neat little trick.