Since that’s not how any of that should work, perhaps either it was ID trouble related (ID troubles hit Azure/O365, AWS, and Google in Dec, Apple’s got company

Since that’s not how any of that should work, perhaps either it was ID trouble related (ID troubles hit Azure/O365, AWS, and Google in Dec, Apple’s got company here), or there’s something odd in the setup you’re shooting for? In the small, iOS devices are one of the few things I can set up fresh for technophobes out of the box and over the phone. In the large, while bringing Apple ecosystem BYOD into a 15K employee bank, we got to see a good amount of setup challenges with various lines of phones, laptops, and desktops (main competing products were Surface, Microsoft’s first party line), and these are the ones that cost us the least to support. The flip side of your experience are my wife and my phones which seamlessly and with zero telco/carrier interaction, upgraded both phones to new hardware (11 to 12) while bringing over both dual SIM card and eSIM plans. First time I’d seen the “We found an applicable cellular plan that could work on this phone, want to bring it over?” (paraphrased) dialog box. There’s just no way clicking OK on that is going to make Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T do the right thing — but it does, in seconds. Both also used the new device-to-device content transfer rather than iCloud restore from backup, with devices usable again in under 45 minutes from start, complete with watches and headphones etc repaired to the new devices. Maybe I’m jaded, but damn this encourages me to evangelize their well-curated garden.