What Does Apple’s Elimination of iPhone SIM Cards Mean – The Good and Bad?

SIM cards are those annoying little bits of gold and plastic that your cell phone provider gives you when you buy a new phone. The SIM card gives the phone it’s personality via a serial number on the card. That serial number maps to your phone number.

The iPhone 14 is moving from a physical SIM card to a virtual one, called an eSIM. It is the first iPhone that doesn’t support a physical SIM. While this is new for Apple, many Android phones have used this technology for years.

Well, unless the phone is sold in China where eSIMs are illegal and Apple is not going to pass up selling iPhones in China, so there are actually two different versions (at least) of the iPhone 14 hardware. iPhones sold in other parts of the world may support both a physical SIM and an eSIM.

So what does this shift mean? A number of things.

First, burner phones. Those are the untraceable phones that bad guys buy that are very hard to trace. The ones you see on TV crime fighting shows. Not that I have ever done this, but you go into a convenience store, buy a prepaid SIM card. With cash. Stick it in your phone and you are in business. At this point the cops don’t know who you are. They can still track your calls, but if you are careful about how you use it, it will be very hard to figure out who you are. You can swap them as often as you want to make tracking you much harder. That means that iPhone 14s are not going to be the phone of choice for terrorists. Or, the very paranoid. At least in the U.S.

The major carriers in the U.S. all support eSIMs, but the smaller carriers and carriers that ride on other carrier’s towers, called MVNOs (Mobile VIRTUAL Network Operators), do not support eSIMs. That means you need to verify that an iPhone 14 will work on your carrier’s service. Or, be willing to change carriers.

Next, if you are a world traveler and you are used to buying a prepaid SIM card at the airport when you land, instead of buying a global plan or paying roaming, that likely rules out the iPhone 14 for you, too.

It is much harder to steal an eSIM. Hackers who have done social engineering “SIM swap” attacks are mostly out of luck if you have an iPhone 14 here. Of course, if they pay off a phone company employee, then they can still do that. Social engineering attacks become much harder. Not impossible but very hard.

For the average customer, this change is basically transparent. Instead of putting a SIM card in your phone, you will navigate some menus to set up your phone.

From Apple’s perspective, things might have been simpler if they didn’t have to make 3 versions of the phone, but since they have to make multiple versions of phones, life is no simpler.

From a law enforcement perspective, it will make things easier to trace people, but only if they have a new iPhone. But, this does not change any other security and privacy features of Apple devices. Credit: ZDNet

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