> How do I move my eSIM to my new phone? You open your web-browser on anything with service (your laptop / desktop / toaster / Nintendo Wii U / whatever), go

> How do I move my eSIM to my new phone? You open your web-browser on anything with service (your laptop / desktop / toaster / Nintendo Wii U / whatever), go to "insert-my-carrier-here.com", login, and click "move eSIM". You type in the IMEI/eSIM ICCID number on the back of your new phone (or in the 'settings' menu on the new phone), and wait a few minutes. Your plan moves over as-is, same with your telephone number, etc. Yes, it's steps, and it takes time, and in a remote situation, those are real barriers with real trickiness. But it's no more tricky than saying, "I smashed my laptop, how do I check my gmail now?". > My old phone is dead and my new phone doesn’t have a SIM. I have to go out of my way to find a Wifi network (for billions of people their phone is their only internet connection) Ok, sure. Yes, eSIM requires you have a new device to connect with. But other than that, it's not terribly tricky. (You can do it via your carriers mobile app, or you can transfer via any web browser, you don't have to get to a store or get a new sim card, its usually free to transfer an eSIM, etc). > Because of this I will end up paying to repair a phone that I have already replaced, just to extract the eSIM! That's not really how eSIMs work. No one regular person would ever need to do that. (If you are already in a phone repair place, you already have everything you need to transfer your service to a new eSIM in ~5 minutes anyway). > eSIM seems like it was designed by someone from the US who has no idea how the rest of the world uses phones, particularly the developing world. Well, I suppose that's fair (in that, half of the carriers in the US already did service provisioning without SIM cards at all on legacy non-GSM networks for a decade, so for them eSIM is entirely upgrade with no downside). But as someone who actually uses eSIMs, the only real annoyance I've seen on eSIMs, is that US Cellular Carriers often lock it down to postpaid only or prepaid carriers don't know how to support it properly, so changing eSIMs on prepaid/mvnos is still a huge pain. (For example, US Mobile's eSIM support didn't reliably work for me on Verizon, but Visible's eSIM support did work on Verizon, despite literally being the same eSIM, same device, same network). Or they put artificial delays on provisioning, so it takes an hour for the network to "update" the "profile" or whatnot. So, while the technology works fine, carriers artificially make it kind of a pain. But that's not SIM vs eSIM's fault at all, carriers also made switching physical SIMs a huge pain for many years (AT&T used to device-lock SIM cards, for example, defeating the entire point of the card). > Then what do I tell customer support? Nothing? It's like saying, "if I want to check my gmail, what do I tell customer support when I telephone call in?". The question is kind of nonsensical. You wouldn't call customer support, the whole point of an eSIM is you no longer have to talk to customer support to transfer the SIM.