I want to buy my boyfriend a new iPhone case as a present, but can’t figure out if it’s an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s. How do I quickly and easily tell his iPhone model?
You would think that it would be quite easy to look at a smartphone and figure out what model it is. Or look in the settings and have the phone tell you exactly what model it is. You would think. Turns out that Apple makes changes to model numbers without actually changing the brand identification. For example, there are three different iPhone 6s models, though only two models of iPhone 7.
Given that, how the heck do you make sure exactly what model of iPhone you’re looking at when you want to buy a case or if you’re considering buying a used iPhone from someone? Turns out there are two different ways, once that’s “hardware” and the other that’s “software” based. Sort of. Here’s what I mean…
Let’s start with the iOS way to figure out what model you have. To do that, launch the “Settings” app:
The path you want to travel is near the bottom of this screen: Tap on “General” to get to the more generic settings related to your iOS device (or your boyfriend’s device, in this instance):
From this point, tap on “About“, at which point you would think there’d be an entry indicating something like “Model: iPhone 6s”, but it’s not quite that easy…
Don’t get confused by the name of this phone: I call it “iDave 7“, but the model number is actually the last entry and it’s the cryptic secret Apple code of MN9H2LL/A.
Not very user friendly! But you can actually do a quick Google search for that model number and you’ll likely find matches that denote exactly what phone model it is:
You can see on the last line and from the shopping matches: The MN9H2LL/A is an iPhone 7.
There’s another way to figure out what model number an iPhone is that doesn’t involve having access to the phone’s iOS system, and that’s by looking at the tiny print on the back of the phone itself. On my iPhone 7, for example, it looks like this:
I’ve left this one really big because it’s tiny on the back of the phone. In fact, the only way I can read it is to take a photo and then zoom in! But here the model number is different, it’s A1778.
Armed with that, you can then pop over to the handy Apple Identify your iPhone model page and figure it out:
That’s probably the easier way if you want the iPhone case to be a surprise: Just take a stealth photo of the back of your boyfriend’s iPhone then zoom in and pop over to Apple when he’s not around and you can figure out whether he has the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s. 🙂