AT&T ruins Apple SIM by locking it to their carrier

If you use Apple SIM and select AT&T as your carrier, you can no longer change the carrier to something else, effectively ruining the Apple SIM. It is a broad yet unsurprising move from AT&T.

Steven Johns News Reporter Neowin @stevenjohns · Oct 25, 2014 20:06 EDT · Hot! with 58 comments

The Apple SIM concept wasn't exactly revolutionary, but it was a pretty great introduction of the technology. The concept is fairly simple: there are a lot of different carriers out there, and rather than buying a SIM card locked down to a specific carrier, you should be able to change your carrier and retain your SIM card. Great right?

Unfortunately, it seems that AT&T was unhappy with this level of freedom. The CEO of T-Mobile, John Legere, posted a series of photos on Twitter showing that once a user selects AT&T as their carrier, they can never change it to something else. This effectively turns the Apple SIM into an AT&T SIM card, and ruining a fairly interesting element of Apple SIM.

On Ipad with@apple sim here is what u see..no @Verizon ,@ATT trying to lock u, @sprint with error page! @TMobile wins pic.twitter.com/z0jDZ9sRt5
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) October 23, 2014

The device itself isn't locked-- you can get a new Apple or carrier SIM and keep using it as you normally would, but the SIM card itself is locked at that point.

It's a fairly unsurprising move from AT&T, but it's still disappointing. Apple largely doesn't care about this, as the point of Apple SIM-- to them-- was to allow the user to buy an iDevice directly from Apple without having to worry about which carrier they're going to choose afterwards.

Source: Twitter