AT&T Breaks The Apple SIM’s Best Feature, Locks It Down If You Pick AT&T

The idea behind the Apple SIM that comes in the new iPads is most excellent: one SIM, many carriers. Whenever you want to switch carriers, you’d just pop into settings and pick the new one. If you want to bring your own SIM, you can — but otherwise, everything happens through software. No swapping SIMs, no ordering new SIMs, no hassle.

Alas, someone had to go and throw a wrench in the gears. AT&T (who else?) is mucking up the whole thing.

For now, the Apple SIM is compatible with four carriers: T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T in the US, and EE in the UK. (Note the lack of VZW support in the states; seems they’re not very into this idea just yet.)

With three of those four compatible carriers, you’re free to stretch your legs, hop between the offerings, and find the carrier that fits your needs.

Pick AT&T, however, and you get a nasty little prompt: “Once activation is complete,” it reads, “this Apple SIM can only be used with AT&T. You will need a new Apple SIM if you change carriers in the future.”

As MacRumors notes, an Apple support page notes this ugly little tidbit:

Using Apple SIM, you can choose from different cellular carriers and their various programs. The data plans vary by carrier. For instance, in the United States, you can choose a domestic plan from either Sprint or T-Mobile and also pick an alternate plan from the other carrier as needed. When you choose AT&T on iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, AT&T dedicates Apple SIM to their network only.

I’ve received confirmation from AT&T that they’re doing this, though I’ve requested further clarification as to why they’re doing it. No response there yet.

Now, this only really applies if you’re buying a new iPad with an Apple SIM installed out of the box — which, confusingly, isn’t all new iPads. It depends on where you purchase the device. Buy it through Apple, it’ll have an Apple SIM. Buy it through an independent reseller, Apple SIM. Buy it directly through Sprint, for example, and it’ll come with a Sprint-only SIM.

But when you get an Apple SIM, you expect it to work a certain way — and for it to continue working that way. AT&T — or anyone else, moving forward — doing this to an Apple SIM post-purchase is really just screwing up the whole idea. If this is its way of resisting the wave of change heading in its direction, then it’s just going to look like a jerk in the long run.

As you might expect if you’re familiar with the guy, T-Mobile John Legere (who also posted the image above) seized the chance to declare a victory:

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog