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Comment by arek_nawo | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see the SIM card go away. eSIM provides just so much better experience.

This also enables easier installation and setup for basically any carrier. Just download the app, configure eSIM and you're good. Maybe the easier switching is why adoption is kind-of slow on the carrier side? Easier to keep you locked-in with more obstacles in place.

Seen some comments mention potential issues with it vs physical SIM, but I hope these get resolved with time or standard solutions are developed. Personally I had no issues with it, using it for over 2 years now.

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I often hear about people having issues moving their eSIM from their old phone to their new phone during new iPhone season. I don't see why I would want that failure mode to exist. With a physical SIM, it couldn't be more straight forward; pop the card out from the old phone and in to the new phone. You don't need permission from anyone, you don't need an app, you don't risk having something fail and having to contact support, you just ... do it.

And if your phone breaks or something and you need to use your old phone, or borrow a friend's old phone, or whatever, you just move the SIM over.

As a consumer, what benefit does eSIM have?

Perhaps you've never actually participated in "new iPhone season" but it never involved moving your old SIM to your new phone. New iPhones came with a new SIM, and part of the activation process involved deactivating your old SIM and activating your new SIM.

As a consumer, eSIMs are fantastic for international travel. I can have a prepaid international data plan up and running before I even get off the plane.

That must be a US thing. Any time I've gotten a new phone (be it iPhone -> iPhone, iPhone -> Android or Android -> iPhone or even Sony Ericsson -> Sony Ericsson back in the day) I've just popped out the SIM from the old phone and put it in the new. The most recent was iPhone 7 -> iPhone 12 and it just worked then as usual.

The only exception is when they've moved to a physically smaller SIM card format.

> New iPhones came with a new SIM

This is literally never the case unless you buy from your operator in some backwards country like the US.

That's not true. For the last few iPhone upgrade cycles, everytime I got a new iPhone I just removed the SIM it came with, and popped in my old one. Everything worked. The only time i replaced the SIM was when 5G came out and it required a new SIM to work.

(This was USA on Verizon)

I have Verizon in the US as well. I suppose it works both ways, then.

If you're changing carriers, you have to get a new SIM, which costs $$ and shipping/drive time.

I change carriers so incredibly rarely (way less than once per decade) that I've never even considered that as an annoyance. Even if I did switch carriers, I can't imagine that I'd have found it to be much of an issue, switching carriers isn't exactly urgent. And the one-time cost of a new SIM is really low.

But I will admit that it's a potential advantage of eSIM. If you do switch somewhat frequently, I can see it being convenient (assuming all the technical stuff works out).

Depends on where you are, in a lot of the world a new sim is a few dollars from any convenience store on every corner, whereas I have no idea where I’d have to go to even talk to someone about an eSIM.

>As a consumer, what benefit does eSIM have?

Better waterproofing?

The main benefit is that it's easier to have multiple eSIMs than to have multiple physical SIMs. Sure you can only have one active simultaneously (I think?), but that's better than the status quo of physical SIMs.

I'm a US/UK resident, and I use an eSIM for my US provider and a physical SIM for my UK provider. Since I use both numbers for various localized services like 2FA, food delivery, etc., the ability to have multiple SIMs has been a huge improvement compared to just a few years ago, when I had to have two phones to be able to log into my bank.

The iPhone can have 2 active simultaneously and quite a few stored.

Are the US eSIM only iPhone models rated better than the EU traditional SIM models? I was under the impression that they're all pretty water resistant these days.

Rating is just a rating.

I'm sure a phone with less external openings like that would still on average fair better against water.

> eSIM provides just so much better experience.

No, it only provides a better experience if you change SIM card more often than you change your phone, which isn't the case for most people.

eSIM card transfer can be a hassle, expensive or outright impossible because it's up to the telco to decide it. I had to visit a store in Thailand to transfer my SIM card. I had to pay $ to re-download my eSIM for another operator. I was simply told "can't do" with a still-active eSIM I bought from Airalo.

Definitely nice to "download SIM cards" instead of buying them, but everything that follows is a pain.

> Just download the app

Hmm, that seems a bit worrisome for someone like me that doesn't have Play Services and only uses software from F-Droid. I haven't really investigated this.. does it always require an app?

> eSIM provides just so much better experience.

Oh man - My partner pre-ordered an iPhone 14 Pro on launch day, first iPhone with an eSIM. Set up was a nightmare and took over a month to get resolved. She thought she was going to lose her phone number at one point. Still don't know if the fault was with Apple or AT&T but leaning AT&T based on some of the conversations we had between the two teams.

Flash forward a few months and my upgrade and provider change went through without much of a fuss.

Of course there can be the chicken and egg problem of you need Internet to provision the eSIM, but until you get the SIM running you have no Internet. WiFi isn't always available.

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