Moving cellular to replacement watch (Verizon)

[DualShock]

Apple is sending me a replacement Series 6 (cellular) due to issues I was having with the original one I bought. The Apple store I went to shipped it out to the depot for repair.

The genius bar support person told me to tap "keep cellular plan" when unpairing the watch. However now I'm concerned that I will have a problem moving the plan over to the new watch.

Even Apple's instructions in the unpairing dialog and on their site are not completely clear on the proper way to do this. To me, "keep cellular plan" implies that pairing the same watch (via IMEI) will simply have the cellular put back on the device when re-pairing. "Remove" implies that you want to remove cellular from the watch, but not necessarily cancel the plan, which would then allow you to apply the existing cellular plan to a different watch, replacement or otherwise.

Now that I'm getting a replacement watch with a different IMEI, will I need to contact Verizon to fix things up? Anyone have any experience with this process?

 

[Boomer5100]

As long as you did "Keep Cellular Plan", the new watch should work without issue on Verizon when you setup the new watch from backup. If not, should be a simple phone call to Verizon to have them switch the IMEI. I had the exact same issue with my S5 watch. I hit "Keep Cellular Plan" and when I restored my new watch with the backup from the old S5, it worked immediately with cellular on Verizon. No phone call needed.

 

[culo77]

I am doing this process now with a replacement. During the set up of the “pair” of the replacement, there is a step that will update the replacement eSim on the watch to you current plan.
That seemed to be the easiest step in the pairing the replacement.

 

[DualShock]

Thanks for the help everyone. With my original watch the cellular plan would automatically be added back to the watch during the pairing process whenever I restored from a backup. With the replacement watch the pairing process added a step to add cellular, which I skipped initially. After pairing, I went back into the watch app to enable cellular, and it brought me to the Verizon portal, which had the option to replace the watch on my plan with the new replacement one, which took a few seconds to complete.