With one aspirational global phone available only from Apple, telecoms would have less to hold over Apple. As parts prices drop, Apple could sell iPhone 5s, 6s, and 14s without telecom subsidies whatsoever. A large segment of customers would demand and choose great support and services from carriers directly, thus eliminating Apple’s need to negotiate with the carrier ‘orifices’.

Apple could eventually move the iOS world (all iOS devices) into an MVNO entity like Virgin Mobile, perhaps even buying VMobile and buying mass bandwidth from telecoms and supporting customers directly.

This might be a good response to Android and other pretenders. Do you think they have the chops to copy and match Apple at the same level of quality and cost?

I don’t.

I think virtual SIM’s would add iPhone carriers (for example Sprint and T-Mobile in the US), not reduce iPhone carriers. And users would often have more than one carrier. They will buy them like apps.

If you compare a Discman to an iPod, you get the idea of what the virtual SIM rumor is about. Although Discman ostensibly has more CD’s (1 instead of zero), it is actually iPod that has more CD’s — many more — but they are virtualized. An iPhone without a SIM slot would not have zero SIM’s, it would actually have unlimited virtual SIM’s.

It’s pretty obvious if you examine the SIM slot that the idea of users removing and installing SIM’s one-by-one as they move around is quaint. They contain even less data than a CD. In an Apple phone, they are entirely anachronistic.

Right now there is a trend of dual SIM slots so users can subscribe to 2 carriers at once, and the phone can automatically switch between them when appropriate on behalf of the user, to save then from roaming charges or keep them connected. Should phone makers put 3 slots in there? 4? 10? What is needed is virtual SIM’s, so the user can take advantage of the original value proposition of SIM’s without having to play DJ with them.

An iPhone 5 with dual-mode radio and SIM slot could be bought unlocked and the in the US, and Verizon and AT&T could compete for your monthly business, and you could swap in whichever SIM was cheaper each month. Or, with a virtual SIM, you could sign up with Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, and your phone could automatically use whichever is cheaper for every individual call, or whichever carrier has a better signal. If you’re in NYC and your iPhone barely sees AT&T, then AT&T will get 49 cents from you that month. That would be actual competition. And it would be yet another example of Apple prioritizing the user over the carrier, something you don’t see with other phones, which are almost exclusively sold by carriers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the new symmetric antenna banding on the Verizon iPhone is adaptive to both GSM and CDMA frequencies.