Originally Posted by
gudugan
- I didn’t see any on the street
- iPhones starting with the XS have specific models for China so it may not work.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202909
- Specifically the iPhone 14 (all US variants) is eSIM only and does not have a SIM slot. Chinese carriers do not currently support eSIM so it will be useless with local carriers unless you fancy buying temporary eSIMs with Airalo.
- Fi should work (last time I tried was 2019) but it was very slow and expensive. I don’t use it anymore, they banned me for too much international roaming.
You have to do the drill I described above. Whether that’s worth it is the question. The service person wondered if they would deactivate my service if I was out of China for awhile but I guess we’ll see.
Vanity numbers are kinda useless because everyone just uses wechat. They offered me a choice of phone number but it honestly didn’t matter.
I really hate how Apple made the US iPhones eSIMs only. I got around that by buying my iPhone 14 Pro Max in Canada. It has a SIM slot in addition to supporting eSIM. It works perfectly with T-Mobile. The funny thing is that my TMO account shows a purple iPhone on my account when I have the black version.