You can transfer the sim but it needs to be activated on the other phone. I have even seen reactivation charges of €5.

Oh, you do? It's still a single point of failure. Customer support servers down? Should have gotten a physical SIM.

Unbeatable servers? Good luck swapping eSIMs when you want to sell/throw away your phone abroad, out of range of internet. Should have gotten a phyical one.

Never out of range? Wonder what you do when your phone breaks and you have no one to babysit you through the process. Should have gotten physical.

Etc.

That's what an additional sigle point of failure means: less control over your own infrastructure.

New technologies often improve things in some way while introducing concerns and potential drawbacks in other ways. The question is whether, on balance, the new way is worth the risk.

My experience so far is that it is — it’s very convenient to be able to use a service like Airalo to order prepaid eSIMs for data service in foreign countries in advance. It makes traveling a joy now, and my wife is irritated a whole lot less by the prepaid SIM hunt I used to go on when traveling abroad. Plus no more tools or risking losing your SIM tray (or the SIM itself) when you swap it out on an airplane tray table.

My experience says that it will get steamrolled and the 1% left hanging, looking at significantly worse solutions, or none altogether.

I know we all hate telcos and mobile phone carriers -- and a lot of their mistrust is quite frankly deserved -- but this seems like an edge case that most customers won't even run into. First they need to switch devices, which eliminates most customers, and then second, they need to experience some kind of failure on switch. If the failure rate is any higher than before, I would be surprised. But let's wait to see the data before we all go up in arms.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212780

eSIMs also have the advantage of an activation card can be sent instantly from almost anywhere (it’s a QR code) which is great if your phone (and physical sim) are lost or damaged.

“Some” is true afaik. It’s at the providers discretion.

AFAIK it’s also only possible if you’re moving from iPhone to iPhone, not if you’re moving to an Android. I’m not certain moving back and forth between multiple phones is easily supported.

I like e-sims in general, but this is a downside for some use cases.

Now, we‘re on a business contract and we have a responsive team on the other side, so the comfort of this hinges on the provider obviously.

One operator even charges 10€ for a new QR code for your eSIM (same price as getting a new physical SIM card).

I recently bought a temporary SIM in the US during my holidays (StraightTalk) and was surprised that you can only use the physical SIM after you register online with you IMEI. I haven't checked, but I imagine that after that the card would only work with that IMEI.

Fortunately, I don't think this is a practice in Europe.

I really hope that it's because they are awful and this is not the typical American mobile phone experience.

It's probably intentional. I was reading an article in the French press the other day [0] on the subject. Some head of something or other in the industry said they were weary of mostly Apple, Samsung, and Google starting to like playing the providers and removing the actual carriers from the users' psyche. "The SIM card is the last physical link between the carrier and the client".

I've also checked my carrier's site for getting an esim. Apparently I'd have to pay the same amount to get one as for a physical one (minus delivery costs). But at least, contrary to some other commenters' situation, they seem to allow you to move it from phone to phone as long as you hold on to your qr code. They, of course, don't offer the option of storing it in the "secure" client area.

[0] https://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/avec-l-esim-la-car...

Yes, but what does that tell us? How is that useful? All you've done is point out a situation where the happy path works. If you have a great carrier whose systems are working correctly then it's going to be fine. That's what you'd expect. No one really cares about the cases where things go right. They're boring. They should be boring. The problem is never what happens when it works, but what happens when it doesn't work.

I've spent the past two and a half decades learning that the happy path is the least interesting part of any system. Building a working app is about 10% of the work of building anything. The other 90% is error handling, designing processes to get things back on track, and managing when things change. If you focus on the bit that works, and you assume that things will work, and that any human part of the system works (where code is written by humans) it is bound to break at some point.

The issue here is that taking a physical sim card works and dropping it in a different handset has far fewer moving parts and it's all stuff that's been proven over the past 30 years. There is less to go wrong. As soon as you start adding carriers and their shitty websites into the mix things will screw up for a non-trivial number of users.

All indications so far are that eSIMs work quite well. Plus it’s pretty awesome to be able to purchase prepaid service through a company like Airalo when traveling abroad and to be able to use it instantly. Same goes for switching carriers.

Generally speaking, leaving something to see if it'll work means it's too late to change things easily if doesn't work. Managing change is one of the hardest things to do in any company, let alone industry, so finding the problems during the testing phase is really important. If it gets to the consumer and things aren't working (which happens a lot) that means people screwed up.

Buying a local sim card and putting it in your phone when you're travelling works fine, and instantly, so eSIMs aren't offering any advantage there besides not needing to go to a local shop.

eSIMs are incredibly user-hostile because they switch the ownership of a SIM card from the customer to the provider, so you're completely at their mercy if you need to transfer over your SIM card from one device to another. And Apple facilitates this.

When your phone breaks, that's not a easy task.