[jaywalk]

Perhaps you've never actually participated in "new iPhone season" but it never involved moving your old SIM to your new phone. New iPhones came with a new SIM, and part of the activation process involved deactivating your old SIM and activating your new SIM.

As a consumer, eSIMs are fantastic for international travel. I can have a prepaid international data plan up and running before I even get off the plane.

[mort96]

That must be a US thing. Any time I've gotten a new phone (be it iPhone -> iPhone, iPhone -> Android or Android -> iPhone or even Sony Ericsson -> Sony Ericsson back in the day) I've just popped out the SIM from the old phone and put it in the new. The most recent was iPhone 7 -> iPhone 12 and it just worked then as usual.

The only exception is when they've moved to a physically smaller SIM card format.

[bandergirl]

> New iPhones came with a new SIM

This is literally never the case unless you buy from your operator in some backwards country like the US.

[ipqk]

That's not true. For the last few iPhone upgrade cycles, everytime I got a new iPhone I just removed the SIM it came with, and popped in my old one. Everything worked. The only time i replaced the SIM was when 5G came out and it required a new SIM to work.

(This was USA on Verizon)

[jaywalk]

I have Verizon in the US as well. I suppose it works both ways, then.