Apple gift cards can be used to purchase devices, apps, music, movies, TV and subscriptions sold by or through Apple. Introduced to Australia in 2021, Apple gift cards replaced the now discontinued App Store & iTunes gift cards.
Summary
You can:
- Use Apple gift cards to pay for Apple devices, apps, games, media and subscriptions
- Add up to $4,999 worth of gift cards to your Apple account
- Pay for devices using your account balance plus another eight gift cards on top
- Easily buy Apple gift cards during one of the regular 20x rewards points offers
You cannot:
- Use Apple gift cards to pay for things not sold by or through Apple
How to use Apple gift cards
The easiest way to use an Apple gift card is to redeem it onto your Apple account. Doing this means your balance is safely tied to your account so you don’t have to worry about losing your gift card.
To redeem your gift card onto your account, you can either go to apple.com/redeem or open the App Store on your Mac, iPad or iPhone, select your account icon and then tap Redeem Gift Card. Up to $4,999 worth of gift cards can be loaded onto your Apple account.
Your Apple account balance will be automatically used to pay for new and existing subscriptions (e.g. iCloud, YouTube Premium) as well as any app or in-app purchases you make. You can also choose to apply your account balance when purchasing Apple devices.
You can pay for an Apple device online using your account balance (with up to $4,999 loaded) plus another eight unredeemed gift cards on top, meaning it’s possible to make very large purchases using only gift cards.
As of August 2024, you now have the ability to add your Apple account balance to Apple Pay. However, this balance can still only be used to make Apple purchases so if you try to use it at another business it will be declined.
Note also that Apple Care can apparently only be purchased in-person at a retail Apple Store using an unredeemed gift card or with your account balance via Apple Pay.
Card tampering
Physical Apple gift cards purchased in-store can sometimes be tampered with. The way this scam works is that criminals take unactivated gift cards off the shelves at shops like Woolworths and Coles, remove the redemption code from inside the packet and then place them back onto shelves.
When an unsuspecting customer purchases one of these tampered gift cards, they are paying to activate the redemption code that has been removed from the gift card packet. This means that what they have paid for is entirely useless.
It’s a good idea to check your Apple gift cards for common signs of tampering before you purchase them. The tampering is often so well done that it’s near impossible to identify a compromised gift card without actually opening it up first.
If you purchased an Apple gift card that has been tampered with, you should go back to the store that sold it to you and insist that you are refunded.
Promotions
Apple gift cards are very commonly included in promotions. Whilst the older App Store & iTunes gift cards were often 15%, 20% or sometimes even 30% off, offers on Apple gift cards aren’t nearly as generous.
When they were first introduced in 2021, Coles, Woolworths and Big W all ran 30x points offers on Apple gift cards but since then the usual promotion has been 20x points (essentially, 10% of the gift card value is returned to you in the form of rewards points).
Over the course of 2023, there were 22 of these 20x points offers on Apple gift cards which works out to be around one every two weeks. However, during the months of September and October in 2022 and 2023 there was a conspicuous absence of Apple gift card promotions, presumably because that’s when the new iPhones are released.
Other stores (e.g. GiftCards.com.au, Giftz, Card.Gift etc) sometimes provide discounts or bonuses on Apple gift cards, though these are nowhere near as common as the 20x points offers at Coles and Woolworths.
The best discount on Apple gift cards seen so far was all the way back in March 2023 when GiftCards.com.au were selling them for 15% off. That offer has not been repeated since.
