Q: iPhone 4 Message:SIM Required (in phone that has no SIM card slot)

How many people are "a ton"? Would that be 10?

It wasn't negative and I'm glad you got your situation resolved and yes I read the entire thread. But "a ton"? I was really sort of surprised there weren't more people in this and the few other threads that went with it and at best counted 15 people here. Just curious what a ton was. I guess the replacement rate on those old phones was far faster than I would have guessed.

You did great work, give yourself a pat on the back. I salute you.

Thanks for all the posts. There is another couple threads with people with this same problem (myself included) being reported under iPhone>Hardware>Iphone4CDMA . I found that thread first as google directed me there but this one has helped me pursue the right course of action. I've got the Apple techs calling me back tomorrow after the engineers review my case number. Thanks again, and hopefully another success story from this thread will be posted tomorrow!

I got myself into this mess this past Friday.

After googling around, I stumbled on this thread. I called AppleCare late Friday. The first "advisor", passed me on to a "senior advisor", who passed me on to a senior engineer, all of this within 30 minutes. I did not pay a $30 fee and none of them asked me to.

He took down my serial number told me he would contact me Monday. They must have done something on their end since as of this (Monday) morning, I am able to get past the activation prompt and the phone is all set up and ready to go.

Hi there. So actually this is a MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR issue I can guarantee it. The reason not as many people are reporting it yet is because this issue pops up under the initial iPhone setup. How many people who own the CDMA iPhone 4 1349 are actually factory resetting their phone this week? Probably far fewer than 1% I would imagine. The reason I can guarantee you that this will continue to be a major widespread issue unless some kind of global fix is administered on Apple's side is that I am a retailer and I sell 500-600 of this model per month. I just received this week's inventory and I'm not even 1/3 of the way through testing and a little under half of the phones I just received have this issue. I receive phones that are factory reset and when I connect to WiFi and go through the setup as soon the phone connects to Apple for validation it receives the SIM card error. So If the hundred phones I've tested so far are any indication this issue is going to affect 30-50% of iPhone 4 CDMA users who factory reset their phone or buy a new one. This a very big problem I am in a living nightmare right now I have close to $20,000 in inventory that is useless and I can't exactly call Apple and give them 200 MEID's at once. I'm having friends and relatives come over tonight and we're going to have an Apple technical support party and we're all going to call.

I have confirmed with apple support that this is a widespread issue.  I contacted apple to report an issue with my 16GB Verizon iPhone 4 and they immediately escalated me to a senior adviser.  I was not charged a fee for not having Apple Care (probably good since this phone wouldn't have been eligible for it for a couple of years now at least).  I was told by this adviser that she'd had three cases just this week about it.  She said that she didn't have a fix but that she was sending the cases to Engineers and that they were trying to find out why this was occurring.  I'm playing the waiting game now. 

You can add one more victim to the list. iPhone 4, CDMA, Verizon, upgraded to 5S, reset the 4 to use as iPod Touch for daughter, and you know the rest. I've read through all 11 pages of this (on the edge of my seat for the first 7 or so), and it looks like the Support/Chat/iOS 8.X solution is the way to go. I'll go down that road tomorrow, and report back with the results. Thanks to everyone who posted here; you saved me countless hours of back and forth with both Apple and Verizon, and I'm glad to hear that this will likely be fixed soon. But not half as glad as my 9-year old.

saya juga dari Indonesia. Apakah iphone anda sudah normal?

FYI, I just read this post, and it is the first one with an iPhone 4s. 4S (Verizon) won't work without SIM...

I posted a link to this thread. I did it in this one and there was another one regarding an iPhone 4 from Verizon, but they were not in the US.

EDIT: this is the other one. Iphone 4 CDMA Activation problem Requires SIM

Thanks for the repost ChrisJ4203.

I'll be calling Apple tomorrow to see if they can sort this out with my 4S. The issue with me, which hopefully won't be an issue for them, is that I don't want to activate it myself, as I now have an iPhone 6 on T-mobile. I just want them to be able to make my 4S activation ready with Verizon, so I can resell.

In any case, thanks for all of the preceding info.