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You need to take a chill pill and relax. If you stop and use your brain for a second, you'd realize that the servers got slammed when all the iPhones were delivered. If you give it a few minutes to an hour like those of us who are rational adults did...you'll get your precious phone activated and you can sass back and forth with Siri all night long...

Thanks for your vote of confidence MovieCutter. It has now been 12 hours and I still cannot activate my phone, and AT&T insists that Apple is to blame, and I need to see Apple to have the SIM card issue addressed.
 
the sim card in your phone does not match the sim card associated with your account

This is terrible! Order a new phone and pay $550 and what u get? No working phone! At&t says its apple's fault and when I try to call apple, the message says all the tech's are busy and try to call back later and then they hang up on u! Seriously horrible! Apple needs to get it together. If At&t says the sim card is ok then why does Apple have to cause problems! BAD APPLE! I cant even use express lane because the "phone needs to be activated"! What a load of crap! That's why I'm trying to get help! BTW also on 5th 2011 model iMac with yellow screens, apple really needs to get it together!
 
I found this on another site? Hope it helps someone else too.

Sherri says: October 14, 2011 at 10:11 pm

My error is the sim card not matching issue… All day, back and forth with Apple and AT&T. In the store, over the phone, etc… Senor reps, customer service, tech support, etc. Apple says it’s ATT, ATT says it’s Apple. Finally after 10 hours of this… I was told that it’s a “known issue” with ATT if you are “cross-upgrading” and purchased your phone through Apple. You are supposed to activate the phone with the original phone number prior to having ATT switch the information to the new number. They said that we need to switch in and out sim cards, buy new ones, and have them put the old number on, activate the phone, get another sim card with the new number. However, they aren’t 100% that this will work and said they are hoping Apple and ATT can resolve the issue. We’ll see what tomorrow brings… Soooo sad and disappointed. First time I’ve ever pre-ordered anything and was ecstatic when the UPS guy showed up… only to end my day in tears and frustration… and NO PHONE….
 
Sherri says: October 14, 2011 at 10:11 pm

My error is the sim card not matching issue… All day, back and forth with Apple and AT&T. In the store, over the phone, etc… Senor reps, customer service, tech support, etc. Apple says it’s ATT, ATT says it’s Apple. Finally after 10 hours of this… I was told that it’s a “known issue” with ATT if you are “cross-upgrading” and purchased your phone through Apple. You are supposed to activate the phone with the original phone number prior to having ATT switch the information to the new number. They said that we need to switch in and out sim cards, buy new ones, and have them put the old number on, activate the phone, get another sim card with the new number. However, they aren’t 100% that this will work and said they are hoping Apple and ATT can resolve the issue. We’ll see what tomorrow brings… Soooo sad and disappointed. First time I’ve ever pre-ordered anything and was ecstatic when the UPS guy showed up… only to end my day in tears and frustration… and NO PHONE….

Same issue here all day :(
 
Sherri says: October 14, 2011 at 10:11 pm

My error is the sim card not matching issue… All day, back and forth with Apple and AT&T. In the store, over the phone, etc… Senor reps, customer service, tech support, etc. Apple says it’s ATT, ATT says it’s Apple. Finally after 10 hours of this… I was told that it’s a “known issue” with ATT if you are “cross-upgrading” and purchased your phone through Apple. You are supposed to activate the phone with the original phone number prior to having ATT switch the information to the new number. They said that we need to switch in and out sim cards, buy new ones, and have them put the old number on, activate the phone, get another sim card with the new number. However, they aren’t 100% that this will work and said they are hoping Apple and ATT can resolve the issue. We’ll see what tomorrow brings… Soooo sad and disappointed. First time I’ve ever pre-ordered anything and was ecstatic when the UPS guy showed up… only to end my day in tears and frustration… and NO PHONE….

I'm getting the same run-around... ATT blames Apple, Apple blames ATT... the entire time, we have a $500 brick.
 
Just got off the phone with at&t and she took my number down and told me she would call me back, she was clueless, told me everything was activated on my account. Also have the same message The SIM card in your iPhone does not match the SIM card associated with your account, going on 24 hours with no phone and no anwsers, getting kind of irratated at this point.
 
Just got off the phone with at&t and she took my number down and told me she would call me back, she was clueless, told me everything was activated on my account. Also have the same message The SIM card in your iPhone does not match the SIM card associated with your account, going on 24 hours with no phone and no anwsers, getting kind of irratated at this point.

Agree. It's to the point that I just want my money back... I don't blame Apple, as it is still a SIM card issue, AT&T shouldn't be so confident, now that they no longer provide the only iPhone service!
 
Well the worst part is the lady didn't blame apple, she wants to talk to apple to see if there is anything more she can do. She admitted on ATT's end they werent ready, she said the only thing they did was bring in extra staff to anwser phones, and they didn't expect this type of traffic and now they don't know what to do.

And to make matters worse, the last lady i spoke with, told me to remove the battery from the phone and restart it.......really?
 
Last edited:
Same SIM swap issue

back and forth and back and forth... both blaming the other. Anyone had this solved yet? I'm happy to send the phone back if these two tech giants can't fix what seems to be as simple as fixing a number in a database somewhere.
 
sim card not matching issue

Anyone with a fix for this yet? I have a genius appt. in a couple of hours but any ideas or suggestions as Im on hold waiting for a my apple tech!?!?!?:confused:
 
I spents 12hr yesterday trying to get out 2 phones activated... Still not activated, and ive had the phones for 24hrs... Plus i was on hold for 3 hours with Apple, and at an att store for 4 hours...

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Sherri says: October 14, 2011 at 10:11 pm

My error is the sim card not matching issue… All day, back and forth with Apple and AT&T. In the store, over the phone, etc… Senor reps, customer service, tech support, etc. Apple says it’s ATT, ATT says it’s Apple. Finally after 10 hours of this… I was told that it’s a “known issue” with ATT if you are “cross-upgrading” and purchased your phone through Apple. You are supposed to activate the phone with the original phone number prior to having ATT switch the information to the new number. They said that we need to switch in and out sim cards, buy new ones, and have them put the old number on, activate the phone, get another sim card with the new number. However, they aren’t 100% that this will work and said they are hoping Apple and ATT can resolve the issue. We’ll see what tomorrow brings… Soooo sad and disappointed. First time I’ve ever pre-ordered anything and was ecstatic when the UPS guy showed up… only to end my day in tears and frustration… and NO PHONE….

^ This was me yesterday...
 
Back and Forth...

Apple finally admitted that it was "probably" the phone. So, they are going to send me a replacement. I paid the $29 (sucker) and I should have a new one by Tuesday or Wednesday. This time I'm going to activate it before I go get sim cards switched. Lesson. Learned.

Still... with all that tech, you'd think they would account for this issue. Good luck folks, but I'm thinking the sooner you get in line for a replacement, the better.
 
Has anyone that's had the "wait for email" message been able to activate your phone?

If so, how?

I've never received an email, been to AT&T store twice, called AT&T Customer Service four times, spoke with Apple Customer Service twice.... after 29.5 hours, still no resolution.... the answers I've received: AT&T says it's Apple's fault, Apple says it AT&T's fault... all the while, I'm sitting with a $400 brick of an iPhone4S with no resolution in sight! I've made an appointment to make the 100 mile round trip to the nearest Apple store to see what they can do (as AT&T won't swap my phone, since I made the purchase through Apple.com).
 
I got the "activation pending, we'll send you an email" message when trying to activate. After trying everything I could think of, I went to the AT&T store where the guy fixed it in like, two seconds by doing a network reset (General-->Reset-->Reset Network Settings). Hope that helps someone.
 
I get a different message when I try to complete the activation of my iPhone. Here it is:

"There is a problem with your iPhone. We're sorry, the iPhone you connected is not recognized and cannot be activated for service. We recommend you visit your nearest Apple Store for more information."

It's kinda lying about not recognizing the device. It knows what it is because when I plug it into iTunes it identifies the device as 'iPhone' but will not display info summary and tabs for syncing in the large pane of the iTunes display. That's where it parks the message.

So the thing is not exactly bricked as in dead hardware. It manages to connect fine via WiFi to a closed WPA2 network once I provide the name and password for it. And it shows up as an iPhone in iTunes, so it's not like it's actually an unrecognized device per se. It's just acting like something is not coded right between AT&T and Apple as far as the phone, my identity and my wireless contracts relate to each other across their databases.

Beats me, but I'm not driving 200 miles rt to apple store, or even 40 rt to an AT&T corporate store if i can resolve some miscoding issue or something over the phone. AT&T supposed to call me on Sunday afternoon and I'm supposed to call Apple on Tuesday if still having a problem. The AT&T rep with whom I spoke said I should receive an email of activation success (based on having provided the correct activation information from a landline) and then try again. Somehow I wonder about that, since other people waiting for that fabled "activation email" seem not to be getting this particular error message in the meantime. I'm not having USB device recognition issues in general, because I've used thumb drives, externals and an ethernet adapter on the MBA at various points over the past two days without any problems. So in some ways I'm hopeful it will resolve as the servers catch up, otherwise through tweaks that either apple or at&t might be able to apply in their coding of my setup.

I am wondering if the thing would activate over their cellular network, if I drove to where there's a signal and turned the phone on. Maybe once I did that, something would change at AT&T's end that might affect what Apple's end thinks. But it's rainy and cold here, and if the answer turns out to be no, I'd probably cave in and buy Chinese food instead of making my own later on when home again. Maybe I'll give that a shot tomorrow morning. Hope everyone else's activation issues resolve as the launch wave finally subsides, whenever that might be! :)
 
I am suspicious to some solutions posted here. I tried calling AT&T, they said there was nothing they could do and that it was a server issue on both their end and Apple's end. The AT&T activation site doesn't work for iPhones. I didn't try the "taking out of the SIM card" idea, mainly because it didn't make sense to activate my phone without the piece of hardware that actually identifies my particular phone on the network. In the end, what solved my problem was just waiting a few hours and trying it again, as described here.
 
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