I read online yesterday that the iPhone 17 line-up is now entirely eSIM, even in Canada. This initially worried me as I own an iPhone 15+ and I’m sold on the Apple ecosystem. I’m not ready to buy a new phone(I have a year left of Apple Care). I read up online and Apple is making it dead simple for me to migrate my phone number to an eSIM iPhone when the time comes.
Is this a concern for you?
I already have a couple of eSIMs in my iPhone 16, so when the new one comes, it’s just a matter of transferring them. If you have a physical SIM, you’ll probably have to ask your provider for an eSIM. In my case, I can create one in my provider’s app.
Thanks for the reply, MiG. I just got off the phone with my provider (Rogers). They said that I can do it myself by installing the Rogers app and creating an eSIM. Then I can transfer the eSIM to my new phone. I do see in my cellular options a button that says convert to eSIM(maybe it’ll work without the app?).
Yeah, there’s no reason for you to do so now, if you have a physical SIM in there.
Yes. My physical SIM is working well. I’ll keep it in place until I’m ready for a new iPhone.
When I switched over from my Google Pixel 6a to the 10, the migration helper gave me the option to create an eSim on the new phone from my physical one for me, even though the model that I bought has a SIM card slot. I can’t see how iPhones wouldn’t somehow be able to do the same.
Yeah for some SIMs, it’s a carrier issue. If you can create a clone of a physical SIM as an eSIM, then it should be fine. But some carriers won’t accept a ICCID that doesn’t match a known IMSI or something alone those lines. Other carriers tie the ICCID to an IMEI.
Some carriers are also good with just copying an eSIM from one device to another, and other carriers won’t allow that.
There’s a lot of “it depends” …
Meanwhile, I have a cheaper Samsung (A15) that I use to fly the Spexi stuff … it doesn’t support eSIM (mine has a dual physical SIM tray). Cheap phone, so what can you expect. I do need to have a tiny bit of data access on it though, so I bought a non-expiring eSIM. And installed the eSIM on one of those of programmable physical SIMs and copied the eSIM profile to it. Works great!
Yeah, I think I’ll follow the instructions given by Rogers and use their app to create the eSIM when the time comes.