You Can Now Get An iPhone 5c For Under $1… Kind Of

The iPhone 5c is a great option if you’re in the market for a new smartphone and aren’t waiting with bated breath for the iPhone 6. Now, you can pick up Apple’s iPhone 5c for under a dollar, although there is, of course, one big caveat.

Walmart is offering the iPhone 5c to shoppers for just 97 cents. You read that correctly: three pennies less than one American dollar.

Madness, right? Well, kind of, but not really. It’s a super cheap price to pay up front for what is really a high-powered device, even if that device’s internals are two years old right now. Before you go rushing out to get an iPhone 5c for less than what you’d pay for a can of Coke, though, you should know a couple of things.

First, that’s 97 cents on contract. In order to qualify for that super-low price, you’ll need to sign up for a two-year contract. That means you’ll wind up paying more than the total cost of a 5c, but that 97 cent price is just meant to get you through the door and signing on the dotted line. That’s pretty standard, though, given that there’s little point in snatching up an iPhone 5c without service to go along with it.

So you have to sign up for a contract along with that new iPhone. Fine. What else is there to know?

Well, the 5c, as we said before, is now pretty much two years old. Sure, Apple rolled out its newer, more colorful iPhone alongside the iPhone 5s last year, but the 5c’s internals are really just the same as the iPhone 5. As we’ve said before, that means the iPhone 5c is no slouch, but it’s no longer a world beater.

What that means is that, sooner or later, that iPhone 5c won’t be quite so spry in responding to your commands. Apps won’t open quite as quickly on it as they might on an iPhone 5s or the iPhone 6 when it debuts. If you mostly use your phone for browsing Facebook, surfing the net, texting, and pictures, that won’t affect you too much. If you just have to have the newest games, though, you’re going to see some lag sooner rather than later.

As we’ve said before, you also might want to hold off on picking up an iPhone 5c for a couple of weeks anyway. It’s hard to get much cheaper than $1 up front, but Apple is going to introduce the iPhone 6 in a short while. That means that the 5c will likely somehow drop even further in price or be replaced entirely by a repackaged iPhone 5s. The short of it is that, if you’re willing to wait for a bit under a month, you’ll likely be able to get an iPhone with a faster processor and a fingerprint sensor. Sure, you’ll pay more than the dollar you’d be forking over for the iPhone 5c at Walmart, but the extras that you get with the 5s technology make it more than worth the wait and the price.