back to article Wanna hop carriers with your iPad's Apple SIM? AVOID AT&T

If you're pumped about using the new iPads' multi-carrier Apple SIM in the US, don't pick AT&T as your first choice – or you'll lose the ability to switch to another operator altogether. Cupertino's marketing claims the new, flashable Apple SIM that comes in the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 allows customers to "choose the plan …

  1. eJ2095

    Sort of defeats the object then

    May as well wang a normal sim card in

    1. Mike Bell

      Re: Sort of defeats the object then

      Not really. If you choose to ignore the warning and go for a lock-in, that's your own stupid fault.

      If nothing else it's a useful shaming device that puts the carrier's lock-in tactics right in your face.

    2. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Sort of defeats the object then

      "May as well wang a normal sim card in"

      Can you? Or is this an Apple proprietary interface?

      If its possible, the answer is to pop the Apple SIM out before walking into the AT&T store*. They'll give you their own SIM as a part of the account activation.

      *That's the shop in the mall with the sign "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" over the door.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Sort of defeats the object then

        It is a standard SIM in a standard SIM slot. Of course you can replace it with your own. The Apple SIM is just a value add (well, if you choose a carrier other than AT&T) so you don't have to get a SIM from the carrier but can use the one that's already there.

        I wonder if it would be possible for Apple to foil whatever AT&T is doing to lock down the SIM, or if it is part of the SIM protocol and there's nothing they can do about it?

        I'm sure the intent is to get this working well enough that eventually they can do away with the hardware SIM and make it software (i.e. certificate based, so you could just copy bits from device to device to move your "SIM") which would totally remove the ability for carriers to "SIM lock" you in. I'm sure the carriers are going to do everything in their power to prevent that, and it looks like AT&T is off to a good start in that regard.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    Call me crazy but...

    ...no way in hell I'm ever paying rent to Apple AND AT&T for the right to access my content on a freaking TABLET.

    So no - I won't be having switching problems. This is apparently a problem for rich, hipster goofballs. Thanks for the word of warning though.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Call me crazy but...

      "This is apparently a problem for rich, hipster goofballs."

      This has always been Apple's audience, always. Marketing agencies of ALL types finally won when they pulled the wool over so many people by making them believe that appearance is more important than being efficient. It seriously boils down to that, but you could never explain that to a third worlder.

      HOWEVER, there is 2 sides here. One side is that companies like Apple (and the zillion others) don't mind to make the poor even poorer for no reason. The other, which I find some light in for things like Apple products, is that they don't mind making the rich poorer for no reason. Greed, which undoubtedly is the fuel that burns the hottest in today's world, has no bias to distinguish between who it affects and who it doesn't.

      This unilateral effect of greed is what I find light growing in, because the audience that will buy Apple isn't the audience that will starve. The audience that will starve is the one that is watching food prices rocket beyond reason due to the nature of greed. In that effect, I'm only seeing darkness grow.

      People are being thinned out based on income on all angles as rapidly it can be done, in all areas of all types of commerce. I don't know why, so I'm not putting on the tin foil hat for this one, but it's happening. I guess I'll learn I'm being paranoid about this in my lifetime, or I'm hoping so, because if I'm not....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Call me crazy but...

        Nope, not crazy. And thinning matches not only my perception but curiously the people I overhear as well. Lower and middle-class are really worried about "redundancies" and "right-sizing" or outsourcing and insourcing to low-cost centers. Hazarding a guess, we're surplus with home and work automation. Strawberry picking robots and Roombas. Definitely solves the servant problem.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: Call me crazy but...

          Except where will all their customers come from once the proliteriat is sucked dry?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Call me crazy but...

      How is using Apple's SIM making you pay "rent" to Apple? They aren't charging you anything for it, it comes with the iPad. If you don't like it, take it out and throw it away, and use whatever SIM you want just like you would in any device that doesn't come with a SIM already present.

  3. James 100

    Roaming?

    "the only UK carrier that has signed on to support them (so far) is EE, rendering the question of carrier lock-in moot."

    Only if (a) the other 3 carriers don't join later, and (b) you never travel outside the UK enough to want to switch to a local provider!

    That seemed to me to be the biggest selling point: use it in the UK on EE, go to the US for a few weeks and you just select an AT&T or Sprint plan to keep online: no more roaming fees, just pay the same price the locals do for that month.

    My UK ISP already does SIMs which allow switching between O2, Vodafone and EE to get the best signal, though I haven't tried it yet - nice to see Apple taking this a step further, just a shame AT&T seem to have sabotaged it.

    1. DavCrav

      Re: Roaming?

      "go to the US for a few weeks and you just select an AT&T..."

      Did you actually read the article?

      1. VinceH
        Facepalm

        Re: Roaming?

        >> "go to the US for a few weeks and you just select an AT&T..."

        > "Did you actually read the article?"

        And did you read the rest of his post beyond that point? He went on to say:

        >> "just a shame AT&T seem to have sabotaged it."

        There was an implicit 'in theory' in the bit you quoted.

  4. sisk

    I could be crazy here, but it seems to me that the case could be made that AT&T is damaging the SIM cards and are therefore liable for property damage to the owners. You'd need a hotshot lawyer to make it fly, and they'd better be damn big hotshots to go up against the team of hotshot lawyers AT&T will throw at them, but I think that you could at least make the case.

    1. Trigonoceps occipitalis

      You won't win, but the lawyers will still get paid.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      If there is such a case to be made, rest assured that Apple will make it, and they have pretty good lawyers (not the IBM Nazgul, but they know their way around a courtroom by now)

  5. tfewster
    FAIL

    Could someone explain this to me in English?

    T-Mobile CEO John Legere -

    "On Ipad with@apple sim here is what u see..no @Verizon ,@ATT trying to lock u, @sprint with error page! @TMobile wins pic.twitter.com/z0jDZ9sRt5"

    From the context, "Lpad" means "iPad". I know all the English words and carrier names. But as a whole, this doesn't seem like an adult communicating, and I don't usually ask eight-year-olds for purchasing recommendations.

    1. Martin-73 Silver badge

      Re: Could someone explain this to me in English?

      no, that word is 'ipad' with the correct capitalization. Twitter as you may well know is limited to a certain number of characters, rendering abbreviations necessary.

    2. Version 1.0 Silver badge

      Re: Could someone explain this to me in English?

      " I don't usually ask eight-year-olds for purchasing recommendations." - but rich, hipster goofballs probably do.

  6. FIA Silver badge

    Got that? When you select AT&T for your cellular data account, AT&T disables the Apple SIM's carrier-switching feature and grabs your iPad for good, and you'll need to pay Apple money to wriggle out of its clutches.

    From the linked Ars article:

    "An Apple customer service representative told Ars that Apple SIMs are available for free at Apple retail stores."

    Or you could just use the free SIM from your new provider.

    1. James O'Shea

      "An Apple customer service representative told Ars that Apple SIMs are available for free at Apple retail stores."

      So... AT&T locks a SIM card, but you can get a replacement, for free, and it's trivial to remove and replace the locked card. So you have two: one for AT&T, one for Sprint and T-Mobile. Or three: the last one's for Verizon, who doesn't allow switching.

      I wonder if anyone's designed an iPad case which has pockets for SIM cards yet? Better yet, I wonder if anyone has designed an iPad case which comes with pockets for SIM cards _and two or three cards_. The cards are _free_, after all...

      If I were in the market for a new iPad (I'm not, my not-quite-a-year-old iPad Air works just fine, thanks) I'd just get a few spare SIMs at the Apple Store while I was buying my new iPad.

      This might actually cause AT&T more trouble than it does Apple.

  7. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    "So... AT&T locks a SIM card, but you can get a replacement, for free, and it's trivial to remove and replace the locked card. So you have two: one for AT&T, one for Sprint and T-Mobile. Or three: the last one's for Verizon, who doesn't allow switching."

    So much more convenient to have 3 SIMs instead of 4. Yeah

    Anyway, "booooo!" to AT&T for doing this. It does seem like the kind of thing they'd do though; man is AT&T greasy.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh, Noooo! Really???

    AT&T signed up for Apple's software SIM thing, but only for the purpose of locking you onto the AT&T network? And Verizon didn't even sign up for the software SIM thing?

    Does this mean that Apple lied when they claimed that purchasing an iPad with a software SIM would allow iPad owners to "choose the plan that works best for you – with no long-term commitments"? This is so hard to believe!

    And the only way of switching to another network, after being locked by AT&T, is by purchasing another software SIM from Apple?

    Say it ain't so, Apple! I refuse to believe you lied to us!

  9. ratfox
    Megaphone

    Witness the power of phone operators

    We're talking about Apple here, which does have a certain power in the market. Yet even them were not able to get Verizon to accept freaking iPads in their system.

    And even Google, with all its "anti-competitive" power, has to bow down to the telcos. Android Lollipop now comes with a default messaging app whose default behavior is to send SMS and MMS messages, which earns the operator money, rather than a hangout message, which does not. Guess why…

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Witness the power of phone operators

      How does it earn operators money when many plans are allotment or flat regarding messages?

    2. David Paul Morgan

      Re: Witness the power of phone operators

      oddly,

      MMS is about the only thing from O2 that 'costs' me as an extra - inclusive minutes and txts - ample and a lot of mobile data - so I don't even use the 'free' txts but the hangouts-over-data (to other hangouts users, of course)

      I sort-of like this soft SIM idea, but the GSM committee needs to get control to allow proper universal free (as in unrestricted) access to it, so ordinary folk can have full flexibility over network providers and data connectivitiy. 1½ cheers?

  10. Fihart

    Softly, softly..............

    "Apple SIMs ship pre-installed in the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 but can be removed with a tool that comes with each device."

    Apple's way of gently introducing the software SIM.

    Next generation they will announce that 90% of users didn't bother to change the SIM ("oh, the tool was that plastic thing I left in the box which I later threw away ?") and would "prefer the convenience" of a software SIM.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Softly, softly..............

      They'd have to get EU law changed first. That mandates a hardware sim switchable by the user so a phone can't be permanently carrier-locked.

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Softly, softly..............

      It's basically a posh paper clip so you can press a button inside a hole to release the SIM, the same as ships with the iPhone.

      But yes, I'm sure the end aim is to have a software SIM. They have to boil the operators slowly though, notice how it was the iPads which had this, not the iPhone 6. The next step will be to include Apple SIMs with the iPhone 7 and a software SIM with future iPads.

      1. Charles 9

        Re: Softly, softly..............

        They may be able to boil the operators but what about the EU? Boil a rock all you want, it's still a rock.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Softly, softly..............

          I don't think the EU has anything to say about tablets though. I'm sure they will push it as far as they can go (hardware SIM on iPhones, software SIM on tablets) and keep lobbying the GSMA about it. As soon as the GSMA say it's OK the EU can't really say no. News about this first appeared in 2010 so it's a long-term thing...

          http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/gsma_apple/

  11. Unicornpiss
    Thumb Down

    Just more sleazy behavior

    ..from a company that I've always personally found to be second-rate anyway. It will bite them in the ass with bad PR and customers that think twice before signing up, as this kind of behavior increasingly does as consumers become (a little) more savvy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Just more sleazy behavior

      Which is sleazier, AT&T pulling the lock-in game, or Verizon not even participating?

      It would be nice if such sleaziness was not rewarded, but they are the two largest carriers in the US so it doesn't seem to be hurting them that bad. Meanwhile you have T-mobile and Sprint trying to be...well....less evil than those two but it sure isn't helping them gain market share.

  12. Lee D Silver badge

    Sounds like a pretty bog-standard lock-in to me. Can't say it's anything horrific, but it's no surprise that Apple plays that kind of game anyway.

    Can't even write an app for Apple without paying annual recurring subscriptions and having to buy one of their devices to do it legally.

    1. James O'Shea

      "Sounds like a pretty bog-standard lock-in to me. Can't say it's anything horrific, but it's no surprise that Apple plays that kind of game anyway.

      Can't even write an app for Apple without paying annual recurring subscriptions and having to buy one of their devices to do it legally."

      Errm... you _are_ aware that it's AT&T doing the lock-in, not Apple, aren't you?

      And as for the "Can't even write an app" part... I've never paid any kind of a 'subscription fee', not even once, much less a yearly one, and I have XCode and the latest SDKs for OS X and iOS. (There's even a big fat 'register for free' button on the downloads page...) I merely went to the ADC site https://developer.apple.com and downloaded 'em. https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action for iOS, https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/mac/index.action for OS X. I registered for free over a decade ago and have never, ever, been asked to pay anything. Not even once. And _of course_ you need Apple hardware to do it. How else were you planning to test the damn apps, using wishful thinking? I can and have installed XCode on a Hackintosh. I just don't trust that anything created on that device will run properly on Apple hardware, so I do actual work on a Mac.

  13. Nelbert Noggins

    And here is the problem with the software only sim. At the moment there is an option to replace the sim, which might be a pain in the butt to do, but once it becomes software only or a sim chip soldered direct to the board, how are you going to swap it then? Can't see Apple replacing the device with a new one just so you can swap provider.

    The carriers still need to sell devices and the manufacturers still need the carriers.

    I still find it incredible that to get decent dual sim phones I need to look to phones for the European market and in the UK they as available as rocking horse poo. While some networks have made steps to allow my UK sim to work in a very restricted list of other countries without a penalty, the same mentality as the satellite industry of ream the customer if they try and use outside their own country exists, which makes the need for swappable sims or dual sim phones necessary.

    I certainly don't want to put the control of which carrier I can use in the hands of the device manufacturer, because they won't stay upto date or will decide who to support depending on whether they're willing to 'sign up' their network.

    Carrier neutrality on software sims sounds like an even bigger joke than network neutrality on the net.

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