You want to buy a new iPhone, so you head to the Apple store, right? Wrong. It's actually the worst place to go for any new Apple product, considering it hosts roughly one discount sale per year.

To find out which places do offer the best deals on iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Airs, the folks over at DealNews tracked several years' [1] worth of Apple discounts.

Turns out the store with the highest number of iPhone deals is a mobile carrier — Sprint accounted for 28 percent of all the iPhone promotions tracked by DealNews. Discounts include $50 off the entry-level iPhone and a free iPhone 5S with a new contract. Yes, free! Plus, Sprint had the highest number of online deals.

The second-best store to buy from? Walmart, which offered 23 percent of the iPhone deals, like when it discounted the iPhone 5S and 5C just two days after Apple's initial announcement.

Third and fourth place go to Best Buy and Fry's Electronics, with RadioShack and Target trailing not far behind.

To see the best stores for iPad and MacBook Air sales, head on over to DealNews [2].

The more you know . . .

Source: Flickr user technamyte [3]; Front Page