All Things Digital conducted an interview with France Telecom (who sells iPhones in 15 countries under the Orange branding) CEO Stephane Richard, and found that his company, along with other telecommunications companies, convinced Apple to wait on the e-SIM standard that they had been working on, and instead adopt a smaller SIM form factor for the time being.
The e-SIM project this article mentions, refers to Apple’s plans to include an embedded SIM card in future iPhone models, this would allow for Apple to significantly shrink the size of the device, due to the removal of all the internals needed to accommodate a SIM card. The telecommunications companies didn’t like this idea, claiming that it would make it more difficult for those companies to work with customers’ devices.
As noted by Richard, Apple has dropped their e-SIM plans for the moment, and are instead adopting a smaller SIM size as an alternative. This would still allow Apple to shrink the size of their devices, albeit not as much as they had wanted, while allowing telecommunications companies to maintain some sort of control.
This of course, leads to remarks made by Richard, wherein he claims that he was lead to believe that the next iPhone would be smaller, and thinner. This claim flys in the face of other recent reports we’ve been hearing, in which the next-generation iPhone will see few cosmetic changes from the current form factor of the iPhone 4, with most of the changes being internal in nature.
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