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Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

> The 10 dropped the physical SIM slot

Not sure about the 10, but at least the 10 Pro still has one.

It was removed from the whole non-folding Pixel 10 series in the US. It still has the SIM card slot elsewhere. We had to return a Pixel 10 bricked due to a firmware bug and it was the US model since we'd bought it in the US and sent it overseas with a forwarding service. Google's repair partner shop was quite confused about the lack of a SIM card slot to get the IMEI and we only had a serial number but they figured out using the serial number instead.

There's still dual SIM support either way and you can store dozens of inactive eSIMs. The main downside of eSIMs is widespread lack of transfer support by carriers.

After switching providers with a recent phone with eSIM, I would say I’d never want to go back to physical SIMs ever again.

They’re going to go away worldwide eventually, they’re just more easily removed in the US where the carriers are more bleeding edge on features and there are only 3 providers to think about in a very large homogenous market.

The difference between waiting for a SIM card to arrive in the mail or traveling to a store, fiddling with a paperclip, tray, and impossibly tiny nano-SIM versus switching providers in 10 minutes via an app is night and day.

Most SIM/dual SIM solutions also involve removing both SIM cards at once even to swap out one of two, and they tend to require device restarts.

In the past I’ve also had network problems as a result of bad/damaged SIM cards.

ooo I can't wait for the CDMA carrier locking boogaloo all over again.

You seem to forget that moving an eSIM between phones isn't nearly as straightforward as moving a physical SIM, and often must be requested or approved by the carrier. If for some reason you intend to use the same SIM in various phones for one reason or another, it's a huge inconvenience.

Technically, the same thing can happen with a physical SIM. I tried that with a Nexus 5X on Verizon and that's how I learned their network has an allowlist system.

How does the carrier even know what phone you are going to use? My last SIM was bought in store at T Mobile, for cash, and I can freely move between phones. I never buy phones from carriers. My Pixel as bought directly from Google and immediately flashed with Graphene.

IMEI maybe?

This could have also been an issue where I needed to activate on some other phone before transferring to a Nexus 5X in order for me to get it to work.

Verizon is known to be the most restrictive carrier in the US as far as allowed devices.

They do know, I experienced it myself.

I had a testing phone and my regular phone, I kept swapping the same Verizon SIM between them. It worked for maybe 3 swaps, then Verizon blocked my account and sent me an email: suspicious activity detected, the SIM is blocked and cannot be restored, the contract has been terminated, you will receive the refund in mail.

Good riddance, US Mobile is so much cheaper and pleasant to use. I am scared to swap SIMs with them now though.

Can I switch out an eSIM while running an AOSP based ROM yet (ie no proprietary userspace)? Last time I checked (several years ago) it didn't seem to be possible. Did that change?

GrapheneOS has support for eSIM management these days but IIRC they need to invoke proprietary Google libraries for that to work.

Why do they do the whole work of designing to separate variants, when they could just ship the single variant and the customers simply never use the slot, if they don't want it?

it might be worth considering that for many Phones different hardware is sold _under the same marketing name_.

The most common versions (in the "west) are AFIK:

- US version vs. international version

(just the most common divide of Phones you will see "in the west", e.g. if a brand sell to China, that also is normally it's own sub-versions.)

the most common differences include:

- different modems

- US phones being carrier locked (which is not normal outside of the US and a few other countries)

- US phones not having sim card slots, the international version of the same (Android) Phones, often still has a physical sim card slot

Not in the United States. Only the Fold still has a physical SIM slot.

Can confirm, pixel 10 is esim only.

It was removed from the non-Fold devices in the US. They kept it for other countries due to only considering the US carriers to be ready for eSIM-only.

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