Hacker News Reader

Comment by th3iedkid | Hacker News Reader

eSIMs are good but it doesn't eliminate the bureaucracy/paper work involved with acquiring an actual network connection, esp for those traveling across countries. Unless ofcourse you are willing to pay those listed roaming charges(some of which appear as hidden charges). Not sure what eSims or even Apple as a company can do about that?

View on HN

Here in Switzerland eSIMs are actually massively worse - you can't swap them around on most operators without calling (!) their support line to manually release and regenerate the eSIM token.

Meaning that swapping between phones now requires calling, possibly expensive, support lines and you better hope your phone issue didn't happen during holidays. And that you have a working backup phone. And you're not in a foreign country trying to put your SIM back.

It's a massive regression of convenience against simply swapping a small chip.

> It's a massive regression of convenience against simply swapping a small chip.

Yeah it's beginning to sound like replacing wired headphones with BT ones

yes iff you would need to contact a support hotline everytime you switvh the audio source or the headphones itself.

if you are mocking the notion that it was courage to get rid of the headphone. Then you are correct But then again I got a phone with headphone jack but still prefer Bluetooth. Especially now when wearing masks,... no cables that get in the way of.taking off and putting on a mask.

I noticed this is a bone of contention among the HN community. It is clear why: both wired and wireless headphones have their advantages and inherent problems that had been discussed ad nauseam. In general, there is no problem as we are free people able to choose what we want and need. The problem appears when a company with a dominant position in the market declares one of these technologies dead and pushes their users towards the other one.

It's not just wireless audio. The same happened with the Ethernet: while most people use WiFi, Ethernet (especially Gigabit and faster) also has its advantages. Removing an Ethernet port is not an improvement: it is a statement.

The ethernet jack is too big, I wouldn't want a thicker laptop just for that. Just get the ethernet dongle if you need it.

I think this battle is long over and done with, but the Ethernet jack is not that big. A Thinkpad T470s/T480s has it and it is plenty thin. There are even some laptops with a collapsible RJ-45 port which allows it to be even thinner.

A USB port is also not that thick yet it has been dropped on many recent laptops, although a Thinkpad X1 Carbon shows it is possible to have USB, HDMI etc on a 2lb / 1kg machine.

The T480 is 30% thicker than the new Macbook pros. I just got the 14" macbook pro and personally I think it's already a bit beefy.

The parent doesn't mention the T480, but the X1 Carbon which comes with a full range of USB and HDMI ports. The Macbook Pro is 1.55cm thick, the X1 Carbon is 1.49 cm thick.

Lenovo also sells the T480s, those are not substantially thicker (1.6 cm high) and beefier and come with a built-in ethernet (!) port.

A serious question: what is the advantage of thinness for you, personally? I have several laptops and I'm on the move all the time. The only disadvantage of thicker ones for me is weight - but it's negligible, even when I'm cycling and my laptop is in my backpack (or, sometimes, laptop bag). Weight aside, the thinness itself has zero advantage for me. I'd much rather have all the functionality removed at the cost of it (not just Ethernet - I care much more about user-replaceable SSDs and RAM).

It's aesthetics/psychological. Weight is also important to me because I travel and the thinness affects my perception of the weight. It's a bit strange that the new Pro feels thicker than my old laptop, the 2015 Macbook Pro, despite actually being thinner. It's because it doesn't have the taper that the old laptop has. Take a look:

Old: https://support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/SP...

New: https://awsimages.detik.net.id/community/media/visual/2021/1...

Some fans value what their preferred brand tells them to value.

I mentioned the T480s. The T480 is much more user-serviceable than a Macbook Pro, with upgradeable RAM, SSD, Battery etc, and much cheaper, so not a valid comparison.

It is awful in Taiwan too.

As per telecom regulation, you cannot get a new eSIM online. The only way is visiting telecom service center in person, verify your ID, pay the fee (about 10 USD), finally got a printed eSIM QR code.

It implies you must pay $10 when you switch to a new phone every time. worse than Physical SIM card.

I believe it depends on the provider - in Italy there are three that currently support esims. A couple (Tim, Vodafone) let you rescan the qr-code multiple times with different phones. The third (Wind) provides a one time use qr-code, you need to show up at the shop and buy a new code (no idea if the serial is the same or not).

In every case you still need to wait for the qr-code to be posted at your mailbox (even if you can sign the contract online).

A potential security weakness as well - they will need to make it more "easy" than it currently is to swap the eSIM between phones.

My carrier in Canada has one-time use eSIM tokens that you can only buy in-store and only from select stores and it costs four times as much as an actual SIM card (20$ for an eSIM token QR code vs $5 for SIM card). If you need to use the eSIM on another phone, you need to buy another 20$ QR code.

If a sim is digital, couldn't Apple put the eSim into your 'wallet' for example? I appreciate that it's not currently designed like that, but given we are just talking bits, just because it's not a fully baked system yet, it can't be?

How is an Apple proprietary wallet an improvement over a tiny chip that works in every phone brand?

You're looking for a solution created for a problem that doesn't need to exist.

You get it. And this IS how it works now. You can have 10+ eSIM profiles on your iPhone with one of them active at a time. Just active the eSIM based on the country you are in. No more tracking plastic bits.

> eSIMs are good but it doesn't eliminate the bureaucracy/paper work involved with acquiring an actual network connection

Of course they do, eSIMs allow companies like airalo to exist. Surely Apple moving fully to eSIMs will bring even more competition to this space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com