Without a lot of fanfare, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) has begun selling a refurbished iPhone 6 with 16 gigbytes of memory for $399. That’s a $150 discount to the phone’s list price of $549 at the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) website and the same price as a brand new iPhone SE.
Or it would be if Wal-Mart sold the iPhone SE at the list price. But Wal-Mart dropped the price on the new phone  to $299 on April 1 and will sell the phone at that price for three months.
But we digress. Besides being a refurbished phone, the Wal-Mart iPhone 6 is locked to the AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) network. The iPhone on the Apple website is unlocked. The discounted iPhone SE at Wal-Mart is available from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.
What, exactly, is a refurbished phone, or computer or tablet? The definition can be squishy, but virtually all definitions refer to a product that was shipped to a customer and then returned for some reason. Often that reason has nothing to do with whether the product was damaged or wouldn’t work, but a lot to do with the customer’s ability to figure out how to use it. No matter — even if the box is unopened, the product cannot be sold as new.
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