Of course I am mad about Apple deciding to remove the SIM tray for the iPhone 14, everyone with two brain cells is going to be mad about that one. And I am especially mad because of the unsurprising future for mobile.
Nowadays the word solutionism is firmly in the category of “Words that have lost all meaning” but the eSIM does rather seem to be an example of that. The only three times when a SIM card becomes an inconvenience is when swapping phones, when swapping carriers, or when the poor integrated circuit has finally had enough of electricity going through it. About once a decade, by my reckoning.
The only people who have multiple of those a year are frequent travelers and extremely wealthy and clumsy idiots that change their phone every week (tech YouTubers).
I don’t know if the second group will notice or even care. But the travelers that don’t want to pay high rates for a roaming provider or an app and would prefer to just have a SIM card for each country they visit have just gotten royally screwed over. Now they have to count on the generosity and willingness of their host country to support eSIM.
Other people getting screwed over (twice) are those who would’ve previously gotten around “Because we can” fees by buying a phone when on holiday or asking someone in the US to buy and ship them one are similarly afflicted until the promise of an eSIM that you can get anywhere becomes a reality.
And it will become a reality.
Because they are Apple, and the other largest smartphone vendor on the planet has for decades now pursued a strategy at “Have PR laugh at apple while we scramble a direct copy of their poor decisions.” Headphone jacks, notches, just two of the examples of Samsung’s insecurity in competing against the fruity one in any way other than “basically the same features but Android.”
And when they remove the SIM tray for their US phones, in about, oh…a year and a half from now that Apple has done it, you will have a bunch of people who can afford a four-figure phone really angry about their eSIM experience. And the more they complain, the more carriers will compromise. By the time eSIM-only makes it to budget phones (and we’re living in a slightly less-crappy version of CDMA again), for good or ill, Apple will have once again decided where the industry goes…and dragged everyone else kicking and screaming behind it.
At some point, back when Apple’s engineers were still forced to deal with dictums from Jony Ive, I was told that the endgame for the iPhone was quite simple. “A smooth pebble of glass and Aluminum.” It seems that, for all its additional thickness and other designs at the Cupertino giant deciding to once again embrace some function beside the form; the iPhone may still in some way be beholden to this rather absurd idea.
They are just some always-on gesture buttons and slightly more capable magsafe away.
