Switching to a new mobile carrier could be much easier with next year’s iPhone, as it has been freshly predicted to come with a pre-installed “e-SIM” that will give the telecom industry a “shake up”.
In a report, Morgan Stanley analyst Emmet Kelly remarked that “E-SIM will likely be included in the 2017 iPhone. … We think e-SIM technology, which allows users to switch between operators at will, brings fundamental changes to the relationship between mobile operators and consumers”.
As further quoted by Investor’s Business Daily, Morgan Stanley says that “all handset vendors will adopt e-SIM in the coming 18 months.” While an e-SIM would, in an iPhone, serve many of the same purposes as a physical, removable SIM card, the phone would have an embedded chip and reprogrammable software allowing users to instantly switch between operators including Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint.
This eased switching could make competition between these carriers even more intense. Previous rumors have suggested that next year’s iPhone, possibly to be called the iPhone 8, could return to a glass body and include iris-scanning technology for purposes such as unlocking the device.
