I bought a dual sim Mi phone for this purpose as well. It worked out really well. At the border crossing from Hong Kong into mainland china, they didn't seem interested in my devices fortunately. Still will wipe my phone before I use it again, however.
This is still an option, and last time I was passing through the HK airport I noticed that a shop next to immigration was selling very reasonably priced data bundles with that kind of dual-network SIM. Highly recommended for those who only stay for a week or two.
I worked abroad for 12 years, 10 even in China where dual sims are even more common. Even my Chinese colleagues would often use an iPhone and just switch the SIM in the airplane, it isn’t that hard. Dual sims are actually meant for (a) people with a personal and business SIM or (b) people cheating on their wife (so an official SIM and a SIM for the xiaosan(s)). Both very niche even in China.
Dual SIM simply isn’t really a feature that would drive phone sales in the states.
Perhaps if they made physical dual sim phones widely available (and not just in China and Hong Kong) they might be able to lure more users. In my corner of the globe, a significant number of people have more than one SIM so Purchasing an iPhone is not very cost efficient. And even if you do have the means to purchase a second device it will most likely be a cheaper android phone. Eventually you’ll come to realize that android isn’t that bad compared to iOS and at times it even does things better. So your next logical upgrade purchase will be a high end dual sim android phone.
My use case would be I have my regular SIM and I have a SIM/SIMs for international travel. In practice, I use an older phone for this purpose but if I had dual-SIMs I wouldn't need to.
I'm not really privy to the psychy of someone who uses a dual SIM, I doubt most readers on Hackernews use one. To me, I visualize a Chinese business man who wants separate numbers to separate his official (married) life and his gray (mistress) life. But this is just a stereotype I developed to deal with going to the provinces.
I just wish more manufacturers would sell dual-SIM variants in the west.
Apparently you could import the old Moto G with dual-SIM from India, but I am not at all sure that all the radio bands fit my operator etc. The support in Cyanogen for dual-SIM is also reportedly somewhere between bad and nonfunctional.
I often carry three phones in my bag and it feels so wrong. I, and everyone like me, could surely pay a premium for this. But those products are kept to lower spec phones sold in Asia or India.
Does the Chinese dual-sim iPhone have any restrictions or downsides compared to a US or EU model? I might consider it as my next step if I can let go of the iPhone 8 and its fingerprint sensor.
> Also, most interesting phone models do not have a dual-SIM option.
This is the strangest thing. In China, phones are overwhelmingly dual-SIM, and it's actually more difficult to find single-SIM phones (even clones of major-brand devices like iPhones will have dual-SIM); the production cost of adding a 2nd SIM socket is negligible.
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