Apple's iPhone 14 lineup will ditch the traditional SIM card slot—and not everyone is happy.
The company is phasing out the SIM card tray in all US iPhones in favor of eSIM, an embedded chip in the hardware that a carrier can program to register a phone to your cellular number.
This means owners “won’t have to deal with a physical SIM card anymore,” Kaiann Drance, VP for iPhone marketing, said during Wednesday’s event. The company plans on implementing the change by requiring consumers to only jump through a "few simple steps" to port their number over to the new iPhone models.
"You can even do this without a Wi-Fi connection," Drance said. "eSIM provides a simpler way to activate and use iPhone."
Support for eSIM was added to earlier iPhone models starting in 2018. Still, the decision to rely exclusively on eSIM isn’t sitting well among international travelers, who use physical SIM cards to change carriers when visiting countries outside the US. Detractors argue that it risks creating a hassle for non-tech savvy vacationers who are unfamiliar with eSIM technology.
Avi Greengart, lead analyst at Techsponential, told PCMag: "I expect a rough transition period while carrier retail figures out how to seamlessly move customers to eSIM."
According to Greengart, carriers have "long resisted the move to eSIM because it makes it easier for consumers to switch services." "The rationale for keeping a physical SIM card slot in European iPhone 14 variants is likely the sheer number of people using prepaid SIMs," he added.
An Apple support page also says the company only supports eSIMs from six carriers in the US. They include AT&T, T-Mobile, Truphone, Ubigi, Verizon Wireless, and Visible. Absent are other carriers such as Google Fi, Consumer Cellular, and Mint Mobile.
Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But during Wednesday’s event, the company noted that iPhone 14 users will be able to store multiple eSIMs/cellular plans on the same device. Greengart, who attended Apple's Wednesday event in-person, said an iPhone 14 will be able to support up to eight eSIMs.
Others are hopeful the change will spark carriers across the globe to adopt eSIM, which first arrived for supported devices around 2017. "The technology sees faster adoption once Apple uses that to sell iPhones,” wrote research firm Counterpoint. “It happened with dual cameras, portrait cameras, the display notch with Face ID. The same phenomenon will repeat with eSIM,”
Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights, also told PCMag he thinks Apple may have bigger ambitions in the future by prioritizing eSIM technology. "Apple is much more likely to push the operators to do something rather than the other way around, so I think this is Apple's own initiative, and I think there could be multiple reasons for it, including down the road wanting to offer connectivity themselves," he said.
During Apple's iPhone event, the company added the eSIM requirement also prevents anyone from removing the SIM card in the event the device is stolen or lost. But Sag doesn't buy that argument, saying "most people's SIM swaps happen without their phone physically being present and are usually a result of social engineering."
For more, check out our hands on with the iPhone 14 lineup and the video below.