Is Sprint's iPhone SE unlocked?

“SIM-free” means your iPhone doesn’t ship with a carrier SIM card. The SIM-free iPhone sold on apple.com and at the Apple Store is unlocked. That means you’re free to use a SIM card from a supported carrier. The SIM-free iPhone SE supports AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, among others. However, it does not support Sprint. If you wish to use iPhone SE with Sprint or a Sprint-supported carrier, choose Sprint as your carrier when you purchase iPhone SE. When the Sprint model is purchased at full price, it is unlocked.

should i have contract with Sprint to purchase iphone unlocked (sim free) model online? i'm not citizen of USA.

I can tell you for sure that if you buy it in a physical Apple Store and choose "No Activation Done During Purchase", and remove the Sprint SIM card and insert a non-Sprint card before the first boot up, and boot you iPhone up and activated, then your Sprint iphone is going to not locked.

However, if you failed to do above, or if you buy it on Apple Online Store, or from Amazon, Walmart, or BestBuy, itmight be going to be locked.

I am running iPhone SE @hcm.sprintpcs.com with a T-Mobile Card and replying you.

Some Apple Salespersons suck, they understand nothing and assume it's going to be domestically locked and internationally unlocked if you do it in may way, which was WRONG. They do, understand one thing perfectly: you can take your SIM card and just buy and then try it in Apple Store and if it doesn't work you can just return it and get your money back.

Wrong. Whether it's locked totally depend on how you buy it.

Basically correct. But I haven even tried to buy it online because even if you pay the full price, you still have activate it before buying it. The crucial thing is: No Activation During Pruchase

Wrong. There are other ways, even if you didn't know.

If you're going to reply to a post from 9 months ago, you need to include some context or a quote in your reply so we don't have to go back 4 pages to figure out what you're ranting about.

Assuming you're referring to the fact that ONLY the carrier the phone is locked to can authorize unlocking it, any "other ways" of getting it unlocked are irrelevant to this discussion as they are unsupported and will void any warranty and forfeit all rights to support.

By other way I meant the official Apple way. Just read my comment on page 5 and you'll see it. It CAN be naturally never locked, though not necessary and cannot be guaranteed by paying full price.

The think is, you knew the fact that only carrier can unlock a phone, and you knew the fact that paying full price does not guarantee the phone to be never locked. But merely based on this two weak fact, you cannot make the claim that whenever you buy a Sprint phone, it's going to be locked.

Any "Sprint" iPhone purchased from a source other than directly from Apple will be locked to Sprint.

Any Sprint iPhone purchased used that originated from a source other than Apple that is unlocked either had to be legitimately unlocked by Sprint or it was hacked or jailbroken to unlock it.

You have added nothing to this conversation. Please refrain from attempting to pass off incorrect information as fact.

{delete}

Ok. I think the issue is you said

Devices sold for use on the Sprint network have never been sold unlocked.

before and I somewhat confused your comment with ChrisJ's comment

pay for a device in full does not guarantee it to be unlocked. You would still need to request the unlock from Sprint.

I guess maybe I meant to reply him and mistakenly replied to you.

Either way, when asked whether Sprint's iPhone is unlocked, answering devices on Sprint network sold for use have never been sold unlocked may be very misleading. One can easily understood devices on Spring to be the Sprint-model in general, and from the original question the statement pointed clearly to the Apple official site (you can see that from the description of every button he chose, which is character-by-character identical to the Apple official site).

By the way, it is so interesting that by the time I commented this thread, it was on the fifth to sixth page, and right now my comment appears to be at the third to fourth page. Was any comments in the middle deleted these days?