The iPhone 17 Event

This time I actually forgot to watch the live event.

The iPhone’s incremental improvements are going to be scrutinized to the millimeter everywhere else, so I am going to focus on one aspect of the iPhone Air that I was expecting–it is eSIM-only, and a herald of what is to come.

And yes, all the iPhones in the US are now eSIM-only, and that worries me. Fortunately that is (for now) not the case in the EU.

I am not a fan of Apple ever completely removing the SIM slot in EU SKUs, for several reasons:

• eSIMs were designed to solve carrier problems, not user problems.
• You become completely dependent on your carrier’s ability to issue an eSIM–which can be a painfully contrived process requiring you to go to a store or scan a QR code that is mailed to you days later.
• Even if you can have multiple eSIMs in a phone, switching carriers on the fly becomes effectively impossible (which is a big thing for carriers, and harks back to when US carriers did not use GSM).
• Most importantly, if your phone has any trivial mechanical issue (broken screen, inability to charge) while you’re traveling, you cannot just move your SIM to an emergency phone.

You can’t even think about it.

Apple doesn’t really care about the implications of switching SIMs because for them the user’s identity is the Apple ID–the phone number is just an extra.

They will relentlessly grind down the iPhone until it is a pristine millimeter-thick slab of diamond with embedded OLEDs, removing every indentation or connector they can from the manufacturing process except the camera bump.

Sadly, the entire industry is likely to go this way eventually. But I will always prefer phones with a SIM slot because they are more reliable (or less locked down) in emergencies, and that’s just it.

I am even less excited about iOS 26 than I was about Apple Intelligence a year ago.

It feels like wanton, wholesale destruction of iOS’s visual identity and user experience for the sake of over-the-top visual flourishes, and it now actually looks like a bad Android skin.

Looking at the new Google Pixel devices, if you squint they look very much the same (with the exception that Android Settings actually look better).

I don’t really want to switch away from iOS, but Apple seems to have lost a lot of the care, polish and thoughtfulness they crafted into their operating systems over the years. Even considering the end-to-end integration of their ecosystem, that isn’t worth much if everything keeps getting uglier and brittle, with long-standing bugs across all platforms that never get fixed.

It just isn’t getting better. Most people in the industry understand technical debt, but the best way I can think of the “26” series of operating systems is that Apple is compounding technical debt with design debt–and if they do not start actually improving their core software they will eventually grind to a standstill in terms of quality.

If “design is how it works”, then Apple hasn’t really tested any of their upcoming releases.