Chalk this one up to “well that was nicely unexpected.” About 2 years ago, Best Buy had a very good trade-in promo for some Tmobile iPhones. I’ve been lazy and have kept the 13 Mini phones sealed this whole time because I wasn’t sure how to unlock them and keep them sealed at the same time; spoiler – not possible. Anyway, I popped in a Tmobile sim card last week and immediately saw the IMEI show up on Tmobile.com; however, the phone status still said locked. I then messaged Tmo asking for the phone to be unlocked since it was fully paid off, but they said I had to wait 72 hours. Sure enough, 3-4 days go by and I check the status of the phone on Tmo again and it was unlocked! I figure it might have been due to the initial message I sent. So I then moved that sim card into a 2nd new 13 Mini. This time, I didn’t contact support at all and sure enough, after 3-4 days, the phone showed unlocked online. I checked the phone itself and it shows unlocked too. Now I regret not doing this 2 years ago when I bought the phones and the value was still high.
Lesson learned – if you buy a fully paid off Tmobile phone and put in a sim card into the phone for 3-4 days, it should unlock itself.
In the past I’ve had to ask T-Mobile to do the unlock, I think, but this same thing happened to me with 15 Max. Just after 40 days on network, it auto unlocked. So this might be a new thing, idk.
Definitely new to me. However, I think I’ve hit a limit because now it’s no longer automatically unlocking my phones.