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Other The world isn’t ready for eSIM only phones…

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nStyle

macrumors 68000
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Dec 6, 2009
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I still think this is a very strange decision by Apple. Why do it in the US only? People in the US travel to countries where eSIM just isn’t nearly as prevalent or easy to set up, including myself. I specifically am avoiding the 14 this year for this reason.

I just can’t imagine the space or cost savings was enough to get rid of the slot all-together, especially only doing it for one country.
 
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Why do it in the US only?
Click to expand...

Because in the US they have the closest collaboration with the carriers.
Also this year the update is not so significant, and they can gauge user feedback by comparing the 14 buyers with the ones that would rather buy the 13.
If there turns out to be a large percentage of users shunning the 14 for this reason, they'll come back on their steps for the 15.

I just can’t imagine the space or cost savings was enough to get rid of the slot all-together, especially only doing it for one country.
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Just like the removal of the 3.5mm jack, it is being done for their convenience only.
But in the end, I think that they won't end production for iPhones with SIM slots in a very long time.
Some markets, like China, are very large and influential and they won't hear anything about this eSIM crap.
In China, Apple has been selling iPhones with dual SIM physical slots (!) since the XR. Go figure.
I checked on https://www.apple.com.cn/iphone-14/specs/ and the Chinese iPhone 14 will still have the option to pop in two physical SIMs.
Though with no eSIM support at all, I think.
 
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I think it is to help push eSim, and with the major carriers in the U.S. already supporting eSim it is a rather good test to see what the smaller carriers in the U.S. does and I can see the phones worldwide progressing based on what happens within the next year
 
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cthompson94 said:
I think it is to help push eSim, and with the major carriers in the U.S. already supporting eSim it is a rather good test to see what the smaller carriers in the U.S. does and I can see the phones worldwide progressing based on what happens within the next year
Click to expand...
I think that somewhat unusually the US market has been treated quite brutally potentially to the benefit of those of us in the rest of the world.

I wrote a week or so back in another thread that one approach that, although very un-Apple-like, might be a transition strategy would have been for Apple to announce this year that from iPhone 15 onwards iPhone would be going SIM-only in order to put the worldwide industry on notice and create 12 months of customer "pester power" around the world to get pretty much every service provider (SP) offering eSIM in time for the September 2023 launch. Well, Apple didn't exactly do that on Wednesday but maybe it sort of did.

Any rest-of-world SP must surely be thinking now that the disappearance of the physical SIM slot on phones in Europe, Japan, Australia and pretty much everywhere else is now only a matter of time and might even be next year. (Apple won't want the inefficiency of producing 2 variants of the whole iPhone range for too long and Tim Cook's background is logistics so my guess is that the physical SIM slot will go everywhere next year at least on the main iPhone15/15-Pro models). If those non-USA SPs not offering eSIM options for all of their plans don't want to risk losing some of their iPhone-using customers they potentially have only 12 months to act.

I feel bad for US users who really wanted to upgrade but are on plans that don't currently offer eSIMS and are now left with the dilemma of what to do but I do wonder if the US market has been made to take a bullet for the rest of us and that by the time the physical SIM slot disappears in other countries (in my case the UK) it won't be such a sudden and brutal surprise and our local SPs will have prepared well.
 
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Carriers were made aware long before it was announced to the general public. eSIM is ready to replace plastic SIMs and its driven as much by the carriers as it is Apple wanting to remove the physical slot from the phone. I understand the international travelers needs but I would bet the vast majority of domestic users are not leaving the US and I would bet many of them have no idea what a SIM even is. The phone will be activated and they will happily use it with no idea otherwise like we do now with iPad and Apple Watch. Users that travel and want another SIM will have options but they will be different than in the past. Adoption of eSIM is a benefit and as people get acclimated they will get used to the idea. It’s not perfect but it’s headed in the right direction I think. I have not used a physical sim in a couple of years at least on any of my devices and I have had quite a few.
 
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eSIM itself does not bother me, I'll adapt. But the idea of no SIM slot makes me a bit leery. I did 16 years with Sprint and SIM cards only became a thing with Sprint around 2011-2012. And Sprint was not unlocking them until 2015.

So for years there were phones that were locked to Sprint that were either very difficult or impossible to get unlocked. As @Lounge vibes 05 mentions, the CDMA iPhone 4 had no SIM. It had an internal network chip that was locked to Sprint. There was no possible way ever to get that phone unlocked and even if you could, with no SIM slot where would you put a SIM?

So that's my concern and what makes me leery. Because of my Sprint experience, a device with no SIM slot indicates to me a locked device that you cannot/will not ever get unlocked. I know eSIM is a different thing, but who's to say we won't soon be encountering threads with users having problems because somehow they can't get an eSIM device unlocked?

I just don't care for the potential for some entity to be able to reach out and lock you down. I don't know much about eSIM (yet) so maybe my fear is unwarranted. But right now it just sets off alarms in my head.
 
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JulianL said:
I think that somewhat unusually the US market has been treated quite brutally potentially to the benefit of those of us in the rest of the world.

I wrote a week or so back in another thread that one approach that, although very un-Apple-like, might be a transition strategy would have been for Apple to announce this year that from iPhone 15 onwards iPhone would be going SIM-only in order to put the worldwide industry on notice and create 12 months of customer "pester power" around the world to get pretty much every service provider (SP) offering eSIM in time for the September 2023 launch. Well, Apple didn't exactly do that on Wednesday but maybe it sort of did.

Any rest-of-world SP must surely be thinking now that the disappearance of the physical SIM slot on phones in Europe, Japan, Australia and pretty much everywhere else is now only a matter of time and might even be next year. (Apple won't want the inefficiency of producing 2 variants of the whole iPhone range for too long and Tim Cook's background is logistics so my guess is that the physical SIM slot will go everywhere next year at least on the main iPhone15/15-Pro models). If those non-USA SPs not offering eSIM options for all of their plans don't want to risk losing some of their iPhone-using customers they potentially have only 12 months to act.

I feel bad for US users who really wanted to upgrade but are on plans that don't currently offer eSIMS and are now left with the dilemma of what to do but I do wonder if the US market has been made to take a bullet for the rest of us and that by the time the physical SIM slot disappears in other countries (in my case the UK) it won't be such a sudden and brutal surprise and our local SPs will have prepared well.
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The U.S. actually has a good amount of both large and smaller carriers that support eSim. From what I could find they are:
  • AT&T (Supports Quick Transfer)
  • Boost Mobile
  • Cellcom
  • Credo Mobile
  • C Spire (Supports Quick Transfer)
  • FirstNet
  • H2O Wireless
  • Spectrum Mobile
  • Straight Talk
  • Strata
  • T-Mobile (Supports Quick Transfer)
  • Tracfone
  • US Cellular (Supports Quick Transfer)
  • Verizon Wireless (Supports Quick Transfer)
  • Xfinity Mobile
Sorry for the list but it is how Review Geek published it, and it was an article that was written on September 8th. I am not sure how familiar you are with U.S. mobile carriers, but that is a good number of them. I am finding it difficult to find a list of carriers that do not support eSim, but if there are some I am sure they must be extremely small because some of those on the list are already extremely budget.

I think the people most impacted in the U.S. market are those that travel abroad often and just get prepaid SIM cards in the country they are in.

Edit: adding source https://www.reviewgeek.com/128893/what-is-esim-and-does-my-carrier-support-it/#autotoc_anchor_2
 
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JulianL said:
I feel bad for US users who really wanted to upgrade but are on plans that don't currently offer eSIMS and are now left with the dilemma of what to do but I do wonder if the US market has been made to take a bullet for the rest of us and that by the time the physical SIM slot disappears in other countries (in my case the UK) it won't be such a sudden and brutal surprise and our local SPs will have prepared well.
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I think the calculated reality is that this is a very very small portion of overall users.
 
Dovahkiing said:
I think the calculated reality is that this is a very very small portion of overall users.
Click to expand...
And that’s not to say you’re wrong - it does stink for them. But it also stank when iPhone was ATT only because VZW and other carriers wouldn’t relinquish OS control to a manufacturer. Apple used their leverage to push the industry a certain way. I think they’re doing similar thing now
 
eyoungren said:
eSIM itself does not bother me, I'll adapt. But the idea of no SIM slot makes me a bit leery. I did 16 years with Sprint and SIM cards only became a thing with Sprint around 2011-2012. And Sprint was not unlocking them until 2015.

So for years there were phones that were locked to Sprint that were either very difficult or impossible to get unlocked. As @Lounge vibes 05 mentions, the CDMA iPhone 4 had no SIM. It had an internal network chip that was locked to Sprint. There was no possible way ever to get that phone unlocked and even if you could, with no SIM slot where would you put a SIM?

So that's my concern and what makes me leery. Because of my Sprint experience, a device with no SIM slot indicates to me a locked device that you cannot/will not ever get unlocked. I know eSIM is a different thing, but who's to say we won't soon be encountering threads with users having problems because somehow they can't get an eSIM device unlocked?

I just don't care for the potential for some entity to be able to reach out and lock you down. I don't know much about eSIM (yet) so maybe my fear is unwarranted. But right now it just sets off alarms in my head.
Click to expand...
While this is a valid concern, I’m pretty sure you can literally just… delete ESIMs if you don’t need them anymore.
 
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It's going to be a fun surprise for a lot of people. The vast majority of consumers aren't like us, reading forums, watching videos, memorizing the specs. A lot of people are going to take their new iPhone out of the box, and be very confused about how to activate and use it.
 
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I'm a yearly upgrader and am literally exiled from every model this year ha. I could understand maybe the non-pro models but all four is a strange move especially the "pro" who are presumably folks that travel world.

Didn't one of the big US carriers have an esim outage that lasted days as well? Apple just lost a customer because my work phone uses a physical sim and I refuse to carry two phone (personal & work). Saves me money I guess ha.
 
They are dual sim phones so if traveling abroad so why not use whichever eSim you want when travelling. You can add multiple esims and just choose the one you want to use at any time.
 
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Yeah this is my worry, because I wanna keep on my network and it looks like they won't support eSIM yet. They haven't even bothered to add visual voicemail in all this time!
 
izzle22 said:
The world was not ready for phones with no headphone jack when that happened either. Just saying…
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Slightly different scenario though. The phones still came with wired headphones and an adaptor to accommodate headphones that people already had. There's no adapter that can help people who are tied to a physical SIM.

Also, headphones are just an accessory. A phone is largely useless without a SIM.
 
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cthompson94 said:
The U.S. actually has a good amount of both large and smaller carriers that support eSim. From what I could find they are:
...
I think the people most impacted in the U.S. market are those that travel abroad often and just get prepaid SIM cards in the country they are in.
Click to expand...

Excellent point. I'm not in the US but on reflection I think you are correct. In the UK I use a local SA SIM when I travel to South Africa so when the UK models no longer have a physical SIM I will be concerned not only with my main UK plan but also about what I will do about my PAYG SIM that I use in South Africa.

Worldwide carriers really do have a lot of work to do potentially in the next 12 months. For travellers I imagine that the use of PAYG plans is by far the majority and in the UK it is the lack of eSIM options for PAYG that is most apparent right now. I don't think any PAYG connection is available via eSIM in either the UK or South Africa which are the two countries I care about. That really does need to change pretty much everywhere to empower international travellers again.

Oh, and no need to apologise for the list. Even as a non-US resident I found it interesting so thanks for posting that.

Edit: Actually, on that list, how many are MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators)? In the UK that is another dead zone for eSIMs. various MVNOs such as Lebara, GiffGaff, Smarty and others advertise widely and I think have quite sizeable user communities but as far as I am aware none right now offers eSIM which would be an issue for me since I use Lebara. Maybe the MVNO market in the US is a bit ahead of the UK in this respect?
 
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nStyle said:
I still think this is a very strange decision by Apple. Why do it in the US only? People in the US travel to countries where eSIM just isn’t nearly as prevalent or easy to set up, including myself. I specifically am avoiding the 14 this year for this reason.

I just can’t imagine the space or cost savings was enough to get rid of the slot all-together, especially only doing it for one country.
Click to expand...
Because the US is a large enough market, only has 3 carriers and people travel much less abroad than Europeans or Australasians do.
 
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