Just purchased another iPhone SE3 for my wife to replace her SE.
I first tried to purchase the phone from the Apple store as a Verizon device but it would not accept the phone number and the purchase failed. Instead I purchased it as an unlocked phone.
When it arrived I copied everything from the SE to the SE3 by placing the phones side-by-side as instructed when powering on the new SE3. It reported that it could not activate the phone number via eSIM.
Finally I gave up and pulled the physical SIM from the SE (the SIM was rated 5G) and put it in the SE3. Worked fine.
So thatās 0-for-2 with eSIM, Verizon, and iPhone SE3.
Iām happy to share these instructions from Casey Liss for converting a physical SIM to an eSIM. I used this myself last September after I had to send my 13 Pro with eSIM in for repair and had to provision a physical SIM for a temporary replacement. This worked perfectly for me.
I like having eSIM because if lost the SIM cannot simply be removed and reused in another phone (assuming I havenāt had a chance yet to contact Verizon to stop its use), and it frees the physical SIM slot for a local SIM when I travel, as Iāve been in places where eSIM is not yet an option for that.
Thanks. I tried that and it failed. I got an error message similar to the one I got on the Apple Store when trying to purchase a Verizon-version phone. Thatās when I gave up and physically moved the SIM.
I really do want to be optimistic about ESIM, but it seems more likely that the carriers will conspire with Apple to simply make convenient travel more expensiveāperhaps not as much as traditional roaming, but it wonāt be as easy to acquire a target countryās SIM in the sense you now do with physical SIMs. I hope Iām wrong.