If Steve Jobs Had His Way, iPhone Won't Have A SIM Card Slot

If it was up to Apple Inc AAPL co-founder Steve Jobs, the iPhone of today would look very different and for one it wouldn’t have a SIM card tray, revealed the “father of the iPod” Tony Fadell in a recent interview.

What Happened: Fadell told the journalist Joanna Stern at a Computer History Museum special event that Jobs did not want a SIM card slot as he didn’t want the phone’s chassis to be marred by “another hole in it,” reported 9to5Mac.

Jobs cited non-SIM card phones from Verizon as an example. Verizon used the CDMA technology instead of GSM and didn’t require phones to have a SIM card, according to Fadell.

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Why It Matters: The iPhone 15 Pro model could completely shed the SIM card. The phone is due for release in 2023 and would sport two eSIMs instead of a physical nano-SIM card slot, according to a prior report.

According to the report, there are indications the Tim Cook-led company could begin removing physical SIM cards beginning with iPhone 14 models in 2022.

Fadell said he used market data to convince Jobs that using CDMA wouldn’t work since the technology had relatively small adoption, according to 9to5Mac.

Recently, Fadell shared an early build of the iPhone conceived by a third-party manufacturer. That prototype sported an iPod with a dial-pad on its back which could be swiveled to the front. 

The iPod pioneer revealed that Jobs was in favor of combining the iPod and a phone and pushed the team at Apple towards that end.

Price Action: On Thursday, Apple shares closed 2.7% lower at $142.56 in the regular session and rose 0.9% in the after-hours trading, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

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