@north What bothers me about the eSim is the idea that access is now just a record in a database somewhere. They can just decide, in the sky somewhere, for totally opaque reasons you can't appeal, that your eSim is invalid. I like the idea of a physical SIM because it separates the service provider marketplace and service provider rules very cleanly from the manufacturer marketplace and manufacturer rules. To bastardize Robert Frost: Good APIs make good neighbors. It seems to me that eSims give companies a lot more control over my device in ways that can't benefit me.

I think I could get any of the purported eSim benefits from physical SIMs, but the companies get a bunch of capabilities from eSims they can't have with physical SIMs. And those capabilities don't benefit me.