Photo: Hadrian (Shutterstock)
While your iPhone does a lot, it’s first and foremost a phone. If it can’t connect to your cellular network, it won’t be much better than an iPod touch. In the past, moving your phone number from one iPhone to another was relatively simple: You pop the SIM card out of your old iPhone, and pop it back into the new one.
However, these days, Apple has moved to eSIM. The iPhone 14 lineup doesn’t have an option for a physical SIM card, so your only option is this embedded SIM. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it could go very wrong. When I tried setting up my new iPhone, I went through Apple’s steps to transfer the eSIM from my old iPhone to my new one. No matter what I did, it just kept failing. With a physical SIM, I could move from phone to phone, iPhone or Android, with ease. With eSIM, I was stuck looking at a $1,000+ paperweight.
You can do what I did: Restart both iPhones, reset your network setting. But the best solution here is to call your carrier. While no one wants to call their carrier when they don’t have to, the rep will be able to trigger the transfer on their end.
