Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacalata | Hacker News Reader

> If you want a new SIM card, and you don't have a contract, just buy a new SIM card and put it in your phone / tablet.

My parents couldn't change a SIM card to save their lives - they couldn't open the phone to get the card out, they'd have trouble holding the micro SIM card if they did get it open, and they'd probably put it in backwards and just scratch the hell out of the contacts if they made it that far. Why should they have to? Oh, sure, they can go to a store. That works if switching networks is something you only want to do very occasionally with plenty of time to plan, but if you can make it easier why not? It's all software, why are we authenticating it by a tiny fiddly piece of plastic? I mean, I do this often enough myself that I carry a little Nokia pin for the tiny hole that triggers the SIM card slot to open on my Nexus, but why should I have to?

View on HN

That's totally weird to me.

I don't want to say it from a position of superiority or anything, just different mobile culture, but in here, changing SIM cards is normal. It's what you do when you buy a new phone, because - as I said below - you get a SIM card separately, even when you buy it right with the operator with the contract.

But I guess it's a different culture

I'd be willing to bet that most people wherever you're from also can't change their own SIM and have the store employees do it (which is how it worked when I bought a SIM card in both London and Seattle in the last two months).

Different cultures for sure.

I've had 5 mobile phones...some candybar in the early 00's, a flip phone in the mid 00's, and iphone 3g, 4s, and now 6. I've never even /seen/ a sim card in person. It's a piece of tech that I shouldn't have to every even know exists. I just want my phone to work. I shouldn't have to play around with a microscopic piece of plastic and metal for that to happen.

Hm. Interesting.

If you want to buy a new phone and keep your number.... what do you do?

Well I guess you can just ask in the store to move it to the new one, that's true. It's just... strange.

You don't ask, they hand you a phone and it just works.

Unless you want to buy an unlocked phone, etc. etc.

Why would you want to do that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

Give the provider the phone's public key fingerprint.

You're letting yourself be constrained by the very brokenness people are saying should be fixed.

Well in that case you have to have it tied with your name, so it will only work for contracts; and only about half of the people here are on contracts.

Works for pay as you go as well

It's a piece of tech that I shouldn't have to every even know exists. I just want my phone to work.

I see it the opposite way. Every phone should have a part in it that is removable and replaceable and ensures that you can do whatever you want with your device. I was staggered when I found out that some US CDMA devices are literally unusable without the permission of the company you originally had service with.

Having a replaceable part is not the only way to ensure you can do whatever you want with your device! It is possible to ensure that with a universal SIM purely through software. That this isn't the current situation doesn't mean it isn't possible. I don't have to replace a tiny little piece of plastic in my computer to install Linux instead of Windows or to connect to wifi using Comcast instead of Qwest.

Southeast Asia? That's one area where there appears to be little, if any, technophobia around SIM cards; and in some of them, on average each person has more than one mobile phone. Multi-SIM devices are also extremely common there.

Same reason that you still keep credit cards around; security. When money becomes involved you don't want the device doing the authorization to have any way to be influenced by the one requesting it.

Apple doing this does solve the issue for some people. However, as the parent poster mentioned, it is not as revolutionary as some make it out to be.

They are not solving a problem that has been unsolved before. Instead, they are providing a more streamlined and hassle-free solution.

Isn't that exactly what they did when they released the original iPhone? Isn't that basically their entire existence?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com