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Comment by markonen | Hacker News Reader

Apple Watch being tied to specific carriers has more to do with the feature set required by Apple (primarily, sharing the same MSISDN between the iPhone and the Watch) than anything directly related to the eSIM.

I would imagine that they (Apple) simply had no appetite for dealing with the user experience corner cases of your Watch having a completely separate identity.

There is precedent for this being relaxed over time and in future revisions of the Watch. For example, Visual Voicemail used to be a requirement for iPhone carriers. Today, no such requirements exist.

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The fact is that as a owner of the hardware, Apple is not giving me any access to swap out the eSIM to whatever I want. They control access to the eSIM.

If they had implemented the watch with a physical SIM (using, say, pair SIMs which have existed since the 90's), I could crack it open and put in whatever SIM card I wanted.

I envision an eSIM iPhone having a beautiful carrier selection portal with gorgeous, high-resolution carrier logos... and only Apple partner carriers, with specific iPhone-tailored plans. Goodbye my discount MVNO.

What's a "pair SIM"? It appears ungooglable.

Is this what kalleboo is referring to https://kyivstar.ua/en/mm/services/voice/sim_pair ?

> Incoming calls, messages etc. can be taken only by one of the mobile terminals, in which SIM-card is in so-called “active” state. Accordingly, SIM-card in another mobile terminal is passive and any outgoing operations can be made from this device.

> To transfer basic SIM-card into active state it is necessary to dial 1071#. combination on mobile device keyboard. In this case extra SIM-card automatically transfers into passive mode. To transfer extra SIM-card into active state it is necessary to dial 1072#. combination on mobile device keyboard. In this case basic SIM-card automatically transfers into passive mode.

Yeah, I can understand why Apple didn't go down this path.

Seems to be a restriction of that particular carrier. I used multi / pair sims regularly years ago on several German networks (I.e. for car phones) and they would all ring on incoming calls. However only one card would receive SMS messages. But that should not have been a problem since iOS can already share them between devices.

Sort of related, I have a second sim card with t-mobile US that allows for calling, receiving and sending texts, all from my primary number. This was the other part of their DIGITS beta.

> For example, Visual Voicemail used to be a requirement for iPhone carriers. Today, no such requirements exist.

I forgot to reply to this part. Visual Voicemail was never a requirement if I just put my own SIM card in. The SIM card was always a run-around any stupid policies. Only with eSIM now that backdoor is closed.

>"I forgot to reply to this part. Visual Voicemail was never a requirement if I just put my own SIM card in."

Can you elaborate on this, whats the connection between visual vm and the SIM?

I think parent meant that a SIM phone can just be used by any carrier, regardless of support for it... I wouldn't need an "iPhone carrier", just "whatever any-phone carrier" for my iPhone... Some features like vvm would not work, but f it.

An eSIM might need that now I can only pick carriers with explicit support for my particular phone.

Oh I see because the VM storage is carrier specific. I think that might be an issue for many people.

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