Other features like battery life are clearly more important to people than thinness and that seems to be catching on with manufacturers (although weight still matters).

I would speculate that removal of the physical SIM card is more likely to be about one (or a combination) of:

* Apple taking even more control over the device

* Making it marginally more difficult to switch to another brand's ecosystem

* Resilience (e.g. water/dust proofing).

> * Resilience (e.g. water/dust proofing).

Phones already were water proof when they had sim cards and phone jack.

While I never owned an iPhone, those changes annoy me immensely. The reason for it is that Android manufacturers are copying all of that. I'm currently want to update phone, and want one with sd card and phone jack. Those two things make my selection much smaller. And looking at trends looks like very soon it will be similarly gone as physical keyboard is.

> Phones already were water proof when they had sim cards and phone jack.

Water resistant you mean. Eliminating more holes will just make them more water resistant, it’s a spectrum of course.

> Phones already were water proof when they had sim cards and phone jack.

As an individual, I agree with you. The industry consensus (initiated by Apple) that the headphone jack ought to go is a great shame for a few reasons and I would happily trade-off some water resistance for its inclusion.

However, when you want to use phones to pull customers into the lucrative world of subscriptions (and the big corps, especially Apple, seem to be heading this way), having a device that is more reliable and less likely to break is very helpful. The longer you can make the device last, the less reason you give the customer to try another, competing brand, and the more you increase the chance that they get pulled into your ecosystem.

We could talk about the ethics and attitude that leads them to locking down the device more and more to increase one-shot longevity instead of making devices repairable. But this is outside of the scope of my original comment.

The original argument I was making was that SIM card removal does seem plausible to me. It fits into a number of trends in Apple devices over the last couple of years, and arbitrarily increasing thinness isn't one of them.

Because the iPhone 12 were mindlessly thinner and had such bad battery life that they had to make the battery bigger?

No I believe the 12 was thicker as well. It’s been something like 5 years since their thinnest phone. The 12 had bad battery life probably due to 5G.