When Apple announced the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro it had a surprise in store, but only if you lived in the United States. If that was you, Apple was going to remove the humble SIM card from your life for good. The rest of the world was stuck with those little rectangular pieces of plastic, but that might be about to change with the release of the iPhone 15 lineup later in 2023.

We are, of course, talking about the eSIM and it's the only way to get an iPhone 14-series device onto a cellular network if it was bought in the United States. But a new report claims that those in France will go eSIM-only with the iPhone 15 and, as a result, so will half of Europe including the United Kingdom.

The France report comes courtesy of iGeneration which says that Apple's test run in the United States has gone well enough for it to push the eSIM on the rest of the world. The outlet mentions its home country of France, but as MacRumors points out, other countries could well be involved.

That's because many European countries use the same model of iPhone under the hood. One example that was given was the iPhone 14 Pro with the model number A2890. That's the one that you can buy in France today, but you can also buy the same iPhone 14 Pro in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and many other countries.

Those countries aren't just in Europe, either. Countries like Brazil, Cameroon, Afghanistan, and Chile all use the same iPhone 14 Pro because their cellular carriers all use the same bands.

With that in mind, it isn't that much of a stretch to assume that at least some of those countries will follow France's lead here. And that's interesting because there are still plenty of carriers that don't support the eSIM. At least, not yet.

We can surely expect that to change soon enough. Apple is expected to announce its next line of iPhones in September, so the clock is ticking.