Great to see Apple taking a firm stance on this, this above other fancy features maintain customer loyalty.

People often point out the law enforcement case for breaking into phones but conveniently forget that the very same security holes used by law enforcement are used to make stealing phones more profitable and by other nation-states to spy, commit corporate espionage, etc.

In some cases, there isn't even that much difference between the two groups.

It's not based on communication, though. It's based on how long it's been since the phone was last unlocked - which is an even stronger safeguard, since it can't be spoofed.

That seems very unlikely.

Apple doesn't save your physical SIM PIN, so it would mean leaving your phone untouched for a while would automatically make it unreachable, since you need to enter the SIM PIN after a reboot.

Untouched and out of range of all cellular networks (disregarding the SIM), most likely; we don’t know how long, though.

If your phone hasn’t connected to a cellular network in weeks and is locked in a stationary box 23.9 hours a day or more, then I’m not sure I would be surprised if it becomes automatically unreachable in this way eventually — it’s becoming unreachable any time it reboots for an overnight iOS update already, right? so an inactivity reboot isn’t going to have a worse impact than that already does.

(Note that physical SIMs were discontinued in late 2022 models, but it allows you to set an eSIM PIN with the same effect.)

As noted elsewhere; turns out it’s 96 hours of inactivity, no other criteria.

I wonder how many people that would actually affect? All iPhones that support iOS 18 support eSIM. Starting with iPhone 14 all iPhones except the SE have only had eSIM.

I would guess that most people with only one SIM go with eSIM if they phone supports it.

You can put a PIN on an eSIM, but is there really much point? My understanding is that the main point of a SIM PIN is so that someone cannot transfer your physical SIM to another phone.

Without a PIN someone could steal your phone and even if they could not get past the phone lock they could just move the physical SIM to their phone and thus take over your phone number. They don't even need to steal your phone--they just need access to it for a few seconds to remove the SIM.

That's not the case with eSIM.

You might want a PIN to keep others from making/receiving calls if they have access to your unlocked phone, but because SIMs permanently lock after 3 failed unlock attempts (with no timeout--a mistake today, another a year from now, and another two years after that and it locks) that's probably asking for trouble.

The physical-sim tray is present for all markets outside of the US on all iPhones.