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I Switched to eSIM, and I Am Full of Regret

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I Switched to eSIM, and I Am Full of Regret


SIM cards, the small slips of plastic that have held your mobile subscriber information since time immemorial, are on the verge of extinction. In an effort to save space for other components, device makers are finally dropping the SIM slot, and Google is the latest to move to embedded SIMs with the Pixel 10 series.

After long avoiding eSIM, I had no choice but to take the plunge when the time came to review Google’s new phones. And boy, do I regret it.

The Journey to eSIM

SIM cards have existed in some form since the 1990s. Back then, they were credit-card-sized chunks of plastic that occupied a lot of space inside the clunky phones of the era. They slimmed down over time, going through the miniSIM, microSIM, and finally nanoSIM eras. A modern nanoSIM is about the size of your pinky nail, but space is at a premium inside smartphones. So now there’s eSIM.

The eSIM standard was introduced in 2016, slowly gaining support as a secondary option in smartphones. Rather than holding your phone number on a removable card, an eSIM is a programmable, nonremovable component soldered to the circuit board. This allows you to store multiple SIMs and swap between them in software, and no one can swipe your SIM card from the phone. They also take up half as much space compared to a removable card, which is why OEMs have begun dropping the physical slot.

Apple was the first major smartphone maker to force the use of eSIM with the release of the iPhone 14, and it makes use of that space. The international iPhone 17 with a SIM card slot has a smaller battery than the eSIM-only version, but the difference is only about 8 percent. Google didn’t make the jump until this year with the Pixel 10 series—the US models are eSIM-only, but they unfortunately don’t have more of anything compared to the international versions.

In advance of the shift, Android got system-level support for downloading and transferring eSIMs. But whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and it’s extremely annoying when eSIM goes wrong.

Please Hold for Support

There have been times when I swapped between phones on an almost daily basis—such was the nature of reviewing phones back when there were a dozen of them coming out every month. Never once in all those countless device swaps did I have a problem with my SIM card. As such, I managed to avoid contacting carrier support for years at a time.

In the three months since Google forced me to give up my physical SIM card, I’ve needed to move my eSIM only occasionally. Still, my phone number has ended up stuck in limbo on two occasions. Android’s built-in tools work better than they used to, and I can’t say what is responsible for the eSIM corruption. However, carriers bear the responsibility for how annoying this is to fix.

The first time, I was logged in to the mobile app for my carrier (T-Mobile). After a few minutes of back-and-forth with support, I was able to use the app to authenticate and get a new eSIM pushed to the phone. It was annoying but relatively painless. The second time a SIM transfer went sideways, I was not logged in to the app, and that was a problem.



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The Razr Fold Adds a Book-Style Foldable to Motorola’s Lineup

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The Razr Fold Adds a Book-Style Foldable to Motorola’s Lineup


Motorola does have another actual new phone: the Signature. It’s a new line of “premium” phones, but the catch is that these devices won’t be sold in the US. For its candy-bar phones, Motorola has dipped its toes into flagship territory every so often, only to dip back out as it struggles to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung; it’s predominantly known for its Moto G budget phones, particularly in the US.

The Signature is just 6.99 millimeters thick—it’s no iPhone Air, but that’s thinner than your usual handset—and it has a fabric-like material on the back. It’s powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset, has four 50-megapixel cameras on the back, and carries a 5,200-mAh silicon-carbon battery in tow. More importantly, Motorola is finally committing to seven years of blanket software updates for this phone. It’s a shame US customers won’t be able to enjoy that.

An AI Pendant

Project Maxwell has a camera, a microphone, and voice control.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

On the artificial intelligence front, Motorola and its parent company, Lenovo, are working together on a unified AI assistant called Qira. It’s the culmination of several AI features both companies have deployed over the years, just in one platform.

It’s powered by various large language models, from Copilot and Perplexity to Google’s Gemini, along with Motorola and Lenovo’s own in-house LLMs. The idea is that instead of reaching for these various services, you can just ask Qira, no matter if you’re on a Lenovo laptop or a Motorola phone. It’ll launch first on Lenovo PCs later this year, then select Razr, Edge, and Signature devices.

Qira also powers Project Maxwell, a concept AI pendant from Motorola’s 312 Labs. If you’re tired of pulling out your smartphone to snap a pic and search for something, well, this wearable solves exactly that. It has a camera and microphone, so just tap the touch-sensitive button on the front and ask a question about whatever you’re looking at—whether you want to know what kind of tree is in front of you, or if you want to add the date of a concert into your calendar if you’re staring at a poster.



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Grok Is Pushing AI ‘Undressing’ Mainstream

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Grok Is Pushing AI ‘Undressing’ Mainstream


Elon Musk hasn’t stopped Grok, the chatbot developed by his artificial intelligence company xAI, from generating sexualized images of women. After reports emerged last week that the image generation tool on X was being used to create sexualized images of children, Grok has created potentially thousands of nonconsensual images of women in “undressed” and “bikini” photos.

Every few seconds, Grok is continuing to create images of women in bikinis or underwear in response to user prompts on X, according to a WIRED review of the chatbots’ publicly posted live output. On Tuesday, at least 90 images involving women in swimsuits and in various levels of undress were published by Grok in under five minutes, analysis of posts show.

The images do not contain nudity but involve the Musk-owned chatbot “stripping” clothes from photos that have been posted to X by other users. Often, in an attempt to evade Grok’s safety guardrails, users are, not necessarily successfully, requesting photos to be edited to make women wear a “string bikini” or a “transparent bikini.”

While harmful AI image generation technology has been used to digitally harass and abuse women for years—these outputs are often called deepfakes and are created by “nudify” software—the ongoing use of Grok to create vast numbers of nonconsensual images marks seemingly the most mainstream and widespread abuse instance to date. Unlike specific harmful nudify or “undress” software, Grok doesn’t charge the user money to generate images, produces results in seconds, and is available to millions of people on X—all of which may help to normalize the creation of nonconsensual intimate imagery.

“When a company offers generative AI tools on their platform, it is their responsibility to minimize the risk of image-based abuse,” says Sloan Thompson, the director of training and education at EndTAB, an organization that works to tackle tech-facilitated abuse. “What’s alarming here is that X has done the opposite. They’ve embedded AI-enabled image abuse directly into a mainstream platform, making sexual violence easier and more scalable.”

Grok’s creation of sexualized imagery started to go viral on X at the end of last year, although the system’s ability to create such images has been known for months. In recent days, photos of social media influencers, celebrities, and politicians have been targeted by users on X, who can reply to a post from another account and ask Grok to change an image that has been shared.

Women who have posted photos of themselves have had accounts reply to them and successfully ask Grok to turn the photo into a “bikini” image. In one instance, multiple X users requested Grok alter an image of the deputy prime minister of Sweden to show her wearing a bikini. Two government ministers in the UK have also been “stripped” to bikinis, reports say.

Images on X show fully clothed photographs of women, such as one person in a lift and another in the gym, being transformed into images with little clothing. “@grok put her in a transparent bikini,” a typical message reads. In a different series of posts, a user asked Grok to “inflate her chest by 90%,” then “Inflate her thighs by 50%,” and, finally, to “Change her clothes to a tiny bikini.”

One analyst who has tracked explicit deepfakes for years, and asked not to be named for privacy reasons, says that Grok has likely become one of the largest platforms hosting harmful deepfake images. “It’s wholly mainstream,” the researcher says. “It’s not a shadowy group [creating images], it’s literally everyone, of all backgrounds. People posting on their mains. Zero concern.”



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The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV

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The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV



New televisions from Amazon, Hisense, TCL, and others are designed to display fine art and look like a painting when they’re switched off. It’s all thanks to smaller living spaces and new screen tech.



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