In Mark Gurman’s latest Power On newsletter, Apple has internally planned to have their upcoming iPhone 14 models feature only eSIM. This will collaborate with the ongoing rumors to entirely replace physical SIM with eSIMs for cellular connectivity.
Although Gurman mentioned that some iPhone 14 models could eliminate the SIM card slot, we might not see this change go into effect until next year’s iPhone 15. There are a lot of benefits to using eSIM instead of traditional SIMs. First, eSIM is all-digital, so customers could activate a cellular plan right out of the box. They won’t need to manually swap physical SIM cards. Second, travel users could have multiple eSIM profiles for several cellular plans (all digital) and switch between them whenever they need to. Lastly, removing the SIM card slot could improve the iPhone’s water resistance and free up more space for other components such as a larger battery.
However, despite the rapid expansion of eSIM availability, not all countries support this new technology. So it’s could be a matter of Apple selling some iPhones with a SIM card slot for a few years before they eventually complete the transition to eSIM.
I hope it’s only on the USA model, the carriers of my country Brasil aren’t ready for eSIM.
They support it, but doesn’t does it properly, and sometimes it’s a pain more than a useful thing.
I even saw people converting their phones removing eSIM and replace with the Chinese dual-sim tray.