Author’s note · 2025-10-03
Connectivity Architecture
After 30 years as the standard, the physical SIM is becoming a bottleneck in the modern hardware stack. Apple removing the tray is not an accident, it is a directive: the future is embedded.
The physical SIM held as a standard for thirty years, which is long enough that most people stopped seeing it as a design decision at all. The tray is a hole in a sealed device, and every hole costs internal volume, water resistance, and structural rigidity.
Ore reads Apple removing the tray as a directive rather than an inconvenience. Hardware choices that look like they were made against the user are usually architecture, and the architecture here points one way: connectivity moves from a component you insert to a profile you provision.
The general lesson he draws is the one worth keeping. When a manufacturer removes something that has been standard for decades, the useful question is what the removal makes room for, not whether it is annoying in the first year.
For a Lagos buyer the practical consequence is specific and easy to get wrong. An imported device is only as usable as the provisioning available to it, so eSIM support is a thing to confirm before purchase rather than after, particularly on devices bought abroad or brought in by a third party.
The transition is not finished and the essay does not pretend otherwise. The direction, though, is not really in question.