Frequently asked questions

RestockOwl tracks the availability of Apple products. For each country it shows Apple's official refurbished listings with the saving against the new price, a 90-day restock history for every configuration, how one configuration's price compares across countries, and which new iPhone, iPad and Mac models can be picked up at Apple Stores.

It can also email you when a configuration you are waiting for comes back in stock.

No. RestockOwl is an independent service run by Marfik Inc., and it is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Apple Inc. It reads Apple's public store pages and sells nothing: every purchase happens on Apple's own site or in its stores. Apple, iPhone, iPad and Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc.

A product that Apple itself has refurbished and sells in the refurbished section of its own online store, usually for less than the same configuration costs new. RestockOwl covers only these official listings, for Mac, iPad and iPhone. It does not cover other refurbishers or second-hand marketplaces.

Apple sets the warranty, the return terms and what comes in the box. Check Apple's refurbished pages for your country for the current terms.

It differs by configuration and by country, and we know of no published schedule. So instead of a general answer, each configuration page shows how many times that configuration came back in the last 30 and 90 days, when it last did, and, once at least 5 listings have sold out, the median time it took to sell out.

• Refurbished listings: the whole refurbished store every 10 minutes in the United States, the United Kingdom and 5 other countries, and every hour in the rest.
• Apple Store pickup: by model and country, usually every 1 to 3 hours.
• Configurations that users are watching are checked more often than that.

The full table, including prices and exchange rates, is on the data methodology page.

Sign in with your email address (we send a one-time code) or with Google, then set an alert from any product page.

• For a refurbished product you pick one exact configuration. For pickup of a new product at Apple Stores you also pick up to 3 cities.
• We email you when our checks see it in stock. Email is the only channel.
• Each account can have up to 3 alerts at a time.
• An alert lasts 30 days. Before it ends we email you so you can renew it.
• Alerts are for stock coming back. There are no price-drop alerts.
• Alerts are free.

No. Browsing is free and needs no account, and RestockOwl takes no payments. Alerts are free too.

RestockOwl has pages for 21 Apple country stores: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Poland.

A country shows data once collection for its store is switched on, and Apple Store pickup pages exist only where Apple has stores. Pages for the 7 English-speaking countries are refreshed more often than the others.

There are a few possible reasons:

• It has not come back in stock in the last 90 days, which is all the history we show. The page says whether it has simply stayed in stock the whole time or has not been seen.
• Our records are still short. Refurbished records begin in late August 2026 at the earliest, and later for some countries.
• It has restocked, but fewer than 5 listings have sold out. The page then shows the count without a median sell-out time.
• Our checks were interrupted. A listing cut by a gap in our checks keeps its last confirmed time but gets no duration.
• It has never been in Apple's refurbished store in that country. A configuration sold only as new has prices but no refurbished history.

It is as accurate as our last check. Every restock time is labeled with its precision: to the minute when the configuration was being checked frequently, otherwise only to the interval between two checks, and unknown when we cannot tell. When a listing was already in stock the first time we saw it, its start time only means "no later than".

Stock can sell out between two checks, and Apple can change its pages in ways we misread. A page usually trails our records by a few minutes to a little over ten minutes, and a page that is rarely visited can trail by more.

Treat RestockOwl as a pointer and confirm the price and availability on Apple's own site. The limits are listed on the data methodology page.

It is the new price of the same configuration on the same country's Apple store, minus the refurbished price, in the same currency. When a configuration has several refurbished listings, we use the lowest-priced one among those that are in stock and recently confirmed. We never compare against another country's price: with no new price for that country, no saving is shown.

Prices are shown the way Apple lists them: before sales tax in the United States and Canada, tax included in every other country. The global price ranking does not adjust for this, and its converted prices are for comparison only. They leave out import duty, shipping and card fees.

No. RestockOwl links to Apple and cannot order, hold or reserve anything. In stock means it was listed at our last check. A popular configuration can sell out before you reach Apple's page, so we cannot promise you will be able to buy it.

Times in the restock history and the "last updated" notes are in UTC, and say so. Pages are built ahead of time and cannot know your time zone. Pickup dates on Apple Store pages are different: "today", "tomorrow" or a date there means the store's local date.

Contact details will be published when the site launches. When you report something that looks wrong, include the address of the page and what you expected to see.