While there’s a lot to love about the iPhone 14, its lack of a SIM card tray in the U.S. variant was controversial, to say the least. Unfortunately, it looks like the iPhone 15 will be following its predecessor’s lead and ditching the SIM card tray as well — this time for models across the globe, not just in the U.S.
According to a report by French publication iGeneration, the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro are likely to be released “without a physical SIM card in France.” Although France is just one country, if iPhones are losing their SIM card slots in Europe as well as the U.S., then it seems likely that they’ll be disappearing entirely for the upcoming generation.
To clarify: there’s nothing wrong with eSIM technology; in fact, it’s pretty great, especially for those doing international travel. That said, eSIMs haven’t quite broken their way to mainstream consumers yet, so those picking up the iPhone 14 in the U.S. had to quickly learn all about them in order to even use the phone. It seems like Apple is looking to put eSIMs front and center with its next major hardware release if it’s completely doing away with physical SIM cards.
As great as eSIMs can be, the transition for many iPhone 14 buyers was something of a pain since phones have been largely using physical SIM cards since before the first smartphones even broke into the industry. For many, switching from a physical card to an eSIM was a little stressful, and now it looks like all iPhone 15 adopters will need to make the transition when the phone line launches later this year.
Apple has been pushing for users to make the switch to eSIMs for quite some time, so it does make sense that it would eventually make the shift to exclusively using eSIMs at some point. Even so, hardware transitions are always a bit tough for people. Apple tends to lead the way when it comes to making major transitions like this (RIP the headphone jack), so it might not be long before other major smartphone manufacturers start ditching physical SIM card slots as well.
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