Totally different experience. Especially when traveling for work, being able to just show up in a country, download an app, and have a working local number within minutes is fantastic.
I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.
>being able to just show up in a country, download an app
This seems like a "draw the rest of the owl" situation. If I arrive in a new country with no phone data (which is why I need a sim in the first place) then how do I download an app? Being able to walk up to a guy at the airport and within seconds slide in a SIM solves that data problem.
not all airports have that. and even when they do I have had to fight to stay online or get online requiring entering email and clicking the link in the email before being granted online access.
As the other comment said it's either airport wifi, prep beforehand, roaming data (if absolutely necessary), or (last resort) you go to a physical phone store usually in an airport and they will set it up for you.
I can download T-Mobile eSIM from Australia - Pay them $15, know what my +1 USA number will be, all before leaving the country. You just can't do this with classical sims.
I've found this as well; totally painless to add a destination data plan just before jumping on the plane. And even switching my local plan was pretty straightforward when a promo offer came in from a competitor.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the stance of the article's author. I recently had a scare with my iPhone 13's battery not being able to charge (it recovered itself eventually) and I realized it was going to be a hassle to switch to another phone if I couldn't get the old one powered on enough to run the esim transfer, much less the whole OS migration.
Note that if you just have a broken phone you don't need a new SIM, you just pop it out and pop it in the new phone. So 1min for a physical SIM vs 0-3 hours to create a new eSIM profile. I know which one will be faster. :)
Yes, that was the situation for me exactly, that basically if I lose or break my phone, I obviously have other devices that can access 1Password and my email, but I'm locked out of anything that requires SMS or an authenticator app to 2FA.
Definitely made me feel that at the very least I should be getting a yubikey so that I can have authenticator codes across multiple devices.
Back when eSIM was relatively new, while upgrading to a newer iPhone, my wife’s eSIM didn’t get transferred over but still got deactivated on the old phone.
And the T-Mobile Germany portal to download a new eSIM required authentication via SMS to that now deactivated number. That was fun. (As they didn’t have an alternative procedures to provision eSIMs in place, we had to go visit a store to get a new physical SIM first and could then convert that to eSIM.)
That's interesting that you can "convert" them. I kind of thought the whole point was there was some non-replicable internal secret that the carrier puts in there and that's why it had to be running on their hardware for so long, since they didn't trust your hardware to do that job.
In my country my number is legally mine for I think 60 days after I stop paying for it or something happens like a faulty transfer. I don't have that issue either.
"No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself."
That's exactly the use case for which the carriers offer roaming plans. The bonus is that you (as in your phone number) get to remain connected and accessible by your contacts, as no other phone number is involved at any point. One should not need to change the SIM unless is about one's phone change.
I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.