Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S pricing being leaked by the source-code section of their respective pages on Saholic, the online retailer, but we’ve done some digging ourselves and as it turns out, the pricing shown is most probably wrong.
There are several reasons as to why the prices shown on the site are almost certainly incorrect. For starters, let’s just outline here what the site’s source code says the prices will be (this was first spotted by Tech Shout). The Indian pricing as per Saholic along with the respective U.S pricing are given in the table below. Screenshots of the offending text strings in the source code are attached at the end.
| Saholic Price (Rupees) | U.S. Price (Dollars) | Equivalent Price | |
| iPhone 5C 16GB | 30,000 | 549 | 33,489 |
| iPhone 5C 32GB | 35,500 | 649 | 39,589 |
| iPhone 5S 16GB | 52,900 | 649 | 39,589 |
| iPhone 5S 32GB | 55,000 | 749 | 45,689 |
| iPhone 5S 64GB | 59,500 | 849 | 51,789 |
You can probably see what’s wrong with this picture. We’ve calculated the equivalent price by taking a rather generous estimate of $1=Rs.61, being the optimists that we are. Even at that conversion rate, both the models of the iPhone 5C end up being somewhat cheaper in India when compared to their Dollar price, something that has never happened. Apple has always priced their unlocked iPhones slightly higher in India than their US counterparts and we don’t see why or how the company will break that tradition.
Looking past the coloured iPhones, when we notice the price of the iPhone 5S, we see another unlikely trend. The iPhone 5S 16GB is to allegedly retail for Rs. 52,900, which is much higher than the starting price of Rs. 45,500 which the iPhone 5 debuted at. Since Apple didn’t raise the price of the unlocked iPhone 5S in the US, we don’t see why they would raise the price in India. While one could say that this rise could be due to the fluctuation in the cost of the Dollar, Apple has had a long standing tradition of sticking to its prices, regardless of many extraneous circumstances.
Lastly, one of the biggest reasons why this price is totally unreliable is because well, if you put the Lumia 1020’s page through the same source-code treatment, you find that apparently this 41-megapixel flagship from Nokia will retail for Rs. 14,999. The Sony Xperia Z1 is supposed to cost Rs. 40,000 according to the code embedded on the Saholic page, but the phone actually launched today for Rs. 44,900.
Just to be clear, this is not false advertising in any way on Saholic’s part. This information has not been displayed to the consumer through their website, and the numbers seen embedded in the code is often just used as placeholders, based on rough estimates. The phones will be coming out very soon in the Indian market, so we just recommend exercising patience till then, or placing an order for an unlocked version from the US.
A screenshot of the code from the iPhone 5C 32GB listing on Saholic
A screenshot of the iPhone 5S 32GB listing on Saholic
A Screenshot of the Nokia Lumia 1020 listing on Saholic