Just buy it abroad should someone in your case really need an iPhone. Or take a 13 Pro which is still great
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Apple Removes SIM Card Tray on All iPhone 14 Models in U.S.
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Apple likely made a deal with carriers, they are getting a cut on eSims or something similarly shady. Sucks
We know, but we also know there's nothing we can do about it. Corporations own us.
I wanted to share something with you guys. Egypt has been against eSIM for long. Like China, carriers there were not allowed to do eSIM and they never supported the Apple Watch for example due to the fact.
Just because the US got an eSIM only version which was a clear last chance warning from Apple to the carrier, the 3 major carriers there already came out saying they have done all the tests necessary to launch eSIM and waiting for approval from the regulatory body.
The regulatory body in Egypt came out a few hours later saying they are studying the ways to offer eSIM to make it as convenient as possible and already talking to 4 major “technology providers” to help make eSIM happen in Egypt.
You guys underestimate Apple. eSIM will happen. It will become the norm. It may take some time and we first eSIM only users may suffer a little but it is the little sacrifice we do for tech to advance.
Just because the US got an eSIM only version which was a clear last chance warning from Apple to the carrier, the 3 major carriers there already came out saying they have done all the tests necessary to launch eSIM and waiting for approval from the regulatory body.
The regulatory body in Egypt came out a few hours later saying they are studying the ways to offer eSIM to make it as convenient as possible and already talking to 4 major “technology providers” to help make eSIM happen in Egypt.
You guys underestimate Apple. eSIM will happen. It will become the norm. It may take some time and we first eSIM only users may suffer a little but it is the little sacrifice we do for tech to advance.
Do we need to wait for an iFixIt (or similar) to do a complete disassembly of the 14 to know if there is technically anything extra apple added in that area? If it is simply an empty void, then USA people got the shaft. The battery should be larger or something added, but I'm guessing it'll just be empty.
That reminds me of the early CDMA phones that could be found in the US. They also came with "esim"
I find that utterly impractical. You fly into vacation, arrive in the terminal and when you try to buy a local sim card, you'll notice that the vendor in egypt/nepal/viet nam doesn't do esim.
It wasn’t the same. eSIM is still a physical SIM chip inside the phone, just not removable but reprogrammable instead. CDMA phones didn’t have any kind of SIM chip, it was just programming and they were far more complicated to activate as everything had to be manually configured. Not the same as eSIM.
Well. Apple Watch has had eSIM since Series 3 and many carriers still didn’t do eSIM since then. Apple then added eSIM to iPhone XS and later but many still did not support it.
What was Apple supposed to do? They dream of a port less, no holes iPhone so they wanted to remove the physical SIM.
They decided to go with US first as most now do eSIM in the US but the same cannot be said about other regions.
Luckily, no one is forced to be the guinea pig. No one is forced to get this new iPhone. At least not the US model. iPhone 13 is still extremely powerful. If it wasn’t, Apple wouldn’t have used the very same chip in iPhone 14 too.
I am happy to be the Guinea pig though so I ordered one and I am willing to take a ride on this cool new adventure. I have been using eSIMs since XS anyways and I travel a lot, not to Asia but I do travel a lot.
Maybe make sure it works first and give users the option on model with vs without.
I tried eSIM (ATT) on my 13PM and moved back to SIM when I kept running into issues - that was an ATT suggestion.
Then I have my main on Mint.
Then there is travel and prepaid SIMs.
This was too much a “my way or highway” tactic. I suspect it is going to take 1-2 years to get eSIM to where it should be to have the no-SIM option. Apple could have offered and still accompish pretty much the same thing. MPO.
This is going to be interesting either way. I for one am not participating.
It's going to be interesting this friday to see how smoothly e-sim activation goes in the US.
That was last year though. Some things have changed this year. iOS 16 made it much easier to switch a physical to eSIM and transfer eSIM between devices. You don’t know how it is this year yet.
Let’s wait till this next Friday and see how it goes. It could go bad, or it could go smoothly and everyone will like it.
I understand that right now we all think of it as a very inconvenient process compared to physical SIM but I am pretty sure most issues will get ironed out soon and they will soon be easier to get and use than physical SIM card.
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I’m not saying the device or OS isn’t capable. I’m saying the eSIM infrastructure to support 100% eSIM for users use is not there. Regionally or Globally.
AT&T this year was an issue for my 13PM try - it worked 95% or so of the time flawlessly. I need 99.99%. Mint has already informed me not to switch to a 14 for my account - I won’t as I use my OnePlus on Mint.
Let’s see how the launch goes. Then let’s see about 3-4 months in for travelers. It should be interesting.
btw - never kill your eSIM on device if it is your only SIM. That will facilitate a trip to the Carrier store.
Something similar is happening in Mexico. For at least 4 years the country’s largest carrier, Telcel, has persistently refused to activate eSIMs on anything other than a MotoRazr or an apple watch. Now, because the US iphone 14 came with eSIM only, rumors are already circulating that Telcel will soon start activating eSIMs on phones other than the motoRazr including the iphone 14, despite that the variant sold in Mexico does cone with an eSIM.
Too bad nobody exerted this kind of pressure for banks and merchants around the world to support contactless so apple pay acceptance could become more ubiquitous.
Or just perhaps Apple is testing this “disconnected” society to see just how far they go fooling the increasingly more gullible US market with substandard products? If the sheeple will flock again in numbers, this passport-less country is truly doomed.
What do you think you will be gaining from the removal of the SIM slot? Not a fan of the humble paper clip?
How easy will they let it be to send your eSim from phone to phone? Say my phone decides to stop working one day (this has actually happened to me in the past with an iPhone 6, while on a trip to Myanmar of all places), but I still need use of my phone number for work or personal reasons... do I now have to go and buy a new iPhone or repair mine? Rather than just grab a $15 throw away phone to tide me over for a few days? Or perhaps swap SIM's over briefly with your partner's iPhone? If it takes longer than physically swapping a SIM card, it's a fail.
More internal space, fewer moving parts, less ingress potential.
Not a fan of the humble paper clip?
We don't need a paper clip to configure a Gmail account, so why do we need one for a cellular carrier?
What do you think you will be gaining from the removal of the SIM slot? Not a fan of the humble paper clip?
I am not sure. I sure would have loved keeping both specially that iPhone 13 can already do dual eSIM if you don’t want to use the physical slot.
It just seems like Apple have been dreaming of a port less iPhone for a long time now and nothing will stop them from making it a reality.
What do we gain of a port less iPhone? Probably amazing water resistance like the Apple Watch.
How easy? That depends. Apple is doing the best it can to make the process easy and convenient. iOS 16 introduced a new eSIM transfer features that lets you kind of “AirDop” an eSIM but the carrier needs to support it first.
GSMA Standard sadly did not include such a feature so Apple had to come out with way to do it and that means carriers got to work with Apple to make this feature happen meaning it’s an iOS exclusive at the moment.
If your carrier does not support the iOS 16 eSIM transfer process then you will need to check with your carrier how to move eSIMs to a different device.
For me, my carrier offers a QR code in their app if it detects that the eSIM was removed. That means I can delete my eSIM right now and my carrier app will instantly show a QR code to re-download the eSIM whether on the same device or another.
If my current device is dead and I cannot remove the eSIM then I can call/email/WhatsApp my carrier and they will drop the eSIM from their end and email me and text me (on another number) a new QR code after verifying my details over the phone.
The process is heavily dependent on what carrier you’re on though. Some can make it easy and support the iOS 16 feature. Some make it tolerable like mine and some may make it a nightmare and ask you to visit a store to get a QR code printed on a piece of plastic.
Now comes the device support question. I see your point. With a physical SIM you can just buy any cheap phone and use it temporarily. Even if it uses a different sized SIM (like micro SIM, or mini) you can just get an adapter for cheap or perfectly align it yourself and get on with your day.
That is sadly not possible with eSIM. With eSIM they cheapest Apple device will be the XR/XS. If we look at the Android side then it is one whole other mess because not many do eSIM yet and even those who do, some of them can’t even make it work yet like Samsung.
I've only used esim with Google Fi and my Samsung but there it works perfectly.
As someone that often travels to countries where buying a cheap SIM card at the airport is by far your best option for local data removing the sim card tray is a total dealbreaker and makes no sense.
As someone that often travels to countries where buying a cheap SIM card at the airport is by far your best option for local data removing the sim card tray is a total dealbreaker and makes no sense.
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If you buy your phone from Verizon here in the U.S. now, it's locked for 60 days if you paid in full. I don't know about if you do financing. Yeah, it shocked me too. I haven't had a locked phone in a long time.
What is however even more alarming is that the American general public will flock in massive numbers to acquire that new shiny purple must have color if the season - iPhone. I sign of devolution.
Apple managed to supply me with a refurbished locked phone once- they claimed this was impossible, and that I must contact the network. Which I did. They were baffled, and said it wasn't them. Took about 7 hours of calls to resolve, on Apple's side in the end, after many denials. They promised me a gift as compensation, which was never provided- and which I chased up a few times- each time nothing. 🤦♂️ that was 5 years ago, but I thought I'd share, as the memory still annoys me! 😂
Edit: Oh yeah, and it wasn't even locked to a network of the country I was in, so I had to waste quite a lot of money making all those foreign calls on Skype!