✕ Enter for a Chance at an iPhone 13 Now
You get a $500 gift card for switching carriers!”
I can almost hear Oprah shouting the many competing offers from all the carriers — AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon — as soon as the Apple “California Streaming” event was over. They’re all offering huge incentives to entice you to trade-in an old device, switch carriers, then sign up for a top-shelf cellular plan. If you’re in the market for a new carrier and iPhone right now, you can probably land yourself a “free” iPhone 13 (or only pay a nominal fee for the flagship iPhone 13 Pro Max), even if you’re preordering before the phones hit stores.
Many of these offers seem too good to be true and are a bit surprising to see on new iPhones that historically have sold themselves. Who can ignore Verizon for giving you a $500 prepaid MasterCard gift card, just for ditching your carrier? How about the sky-high trade-in offers that all the carriers are advertising, like the too-good-to-be-true offer of giving you $350 for a used Samsung A50, which retails about $180? Across the board, the carriers are particularly aggressive with their signup offers this year, as detailed in our preorder guide.