If you want to switch over to Virgin Mobile from your existing network for its low prices, you’ll have to go Windows Phone or Android: Sprint’s pre-paid subsidiary seems to have stopped selling the iPhone.
Shortly after the iPhone 6 release, Virgin Mobile told consumers that it had no plans to offer the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, so this was probably a long time coming. However, up until now, Virgin Mobile was at least still offering the iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, and even the iPhone 4S. Now, though, any attempt to go to Virgin Mobile’s dedicated iPhone page just reroutes you to a page full of the carrier’s other phones, where the iPhone no longer appears.
Virgin Mobile never sold a lot of iPhones. Although the iPhone launched on the nation’s biggest pre-paid carrier with a lot of fanfare, sales were disappointing from the get-go, with analysts describing the opening weekend’s sales as a big fizzle.
So it’s not really a big surprise that Virgin Mobile has stopped selling the iPhone. To be honest, once T-Mobile came around with its Uncarrier plans, the value proposition of spending $649 upfront to buy an unlocked iPhone to use on a pre-paid network with sort of crappy coverage started looking differently.
Via: Slashgear
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
7 responses to “The iPhone and Virgin Mobile break up”
I bought iPhone 5 the first week it was on VM. They had a $100 off the purchase price so my out of pocket was like $450 and monthly fee is $25. Poor people make poor decisions so they will always be poor.
Having expensive phones on budget carriers seems contradictory anyway. Which is why I don’t understand why Sprint and T-Mobile are all about the iPhone and Android flagships when they should be about budget Windows and Android.
That’s a shame. I drive all across the country with an iPhone 4s/Virgin Mobile and an iPad Air with T-Mobile. In the past 6 months, I had T-Mobile reception without Virgin Mobile reception only 3 times. All the other times I lost reception on one device, it was Virgin Mobile that stayed connected and the t-mobile that crapped out.
I have an Iphone with VM and have been very happy. I’ve had it for a couple of years now. I’ll keep their service and when this phone needs to be replaced, I guess I’ll go android.
This sucks. Most of their android options are aweful, especially considering that Virgin Mobile will probably not ever upgrade the phones to the newest android os. Yes the iPhone was expensive, but it worked, Apple upgraded it, and my reception has never been an issue.
not so in UK
I have had Virgin Mobile phones for years and upgraded to the Apple 4 when Virgin offered it. I have always had reception even when friends around me couldn’t get reception on Tmobile or ATT. I would have preferred to go Android but went IPhone because family members in another state have it and we could facetime. Now that I have everything on my IPhone, I guess when I have to replace, I have to change carriers to be able to transfer everything thru the cloud. It’s too much hassle to transfer everything from IPhone to android.