The iPhone Air has been unveiled, and its lack of a physical SIM slot heralds the arrival of the first purely eSIM smartphone from Apple. This will put many on edge, but this is not a surprise. In the US, Apple has not included a physical SIM slot since the iPhone 14 (released in 2022), but now that approach is going global, with the iPhone Air. The SIM card used to provide the MNOs with an iron grip on the phone. The arrival of MVNOs, and their own supply of SIM cards, lessened this control, but the ‘locking’ of phones to networks (essentially via radio incompatibility with other networks) also helped keep consumers from moving between rivals. Locking has generally…