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

I decided to go through chat and see how far I would get. The young man on chat (Lennix) was extremely helpful and extraordinarily nice. I have been a loyal Apple customer for years and have not had anything other than an iPhone since my first iPhone 4. My oldest son, longer than that with a first and second generation iPod. I guess I am lucky but I have never had a bad experience with Apple through the years.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. My ticket has been escalated and expecting a call back. I do hope this works. I have three iPhone 4's and one iPhone 4s that will be reset at some point for my kids and I are giving the phones along with three months service to some of the less fortunate kids in our area. This was the first one that was reset and I dread what will come as the others are reset before being given to these children. Whatever happens I will have to deal with one at a time regardless of the consequences. Although with my luck, I see a lot of time being spent talking or chatting with Apple employees.

Updates will be posted as they come to pass. This particular iPhone is a black 16 GB A1349 CDMA iPhone 4. This phone was activated on Verizon when the SIM activation message made it's debut. This forum helped immensely. Usually I am the one person that things happen to that are unheard of and they don't happen to anyone else. I hate that all of us had to take this journey, but at least we weren't in this by ourselves. Thanks y'all. Your posts are more appreciated than you know. 🙂

You are welcome! Rosindabow did us all a favor opening this discussion in the first place.

After a couple of Apple Store visits and tickets escalated to Engineering, my phone activated properly last night. Woo-hoo!

Will keep an eye out on CNET to see if there is ever a broader mention of this... depending on how widespread this issue actually is.

Thanks to the community for all the help.

I Have posted a few times on here since my Verizon iPhone 4 was reset for my husband last week after numerous calls to verizon I found this on here "thankfully" and it helped me tremendously to find the solution and that it was an apple issue I called Apple late Sunday evening and got transferred to someone who was familiar with this issue at Apple "Darrell" he was so nice knew exactly what to do and helped me get the info they needed to fix my iPhone 4 and when I got home yesterday evening I had a message from him I called him back at his extension and I'm soooo happy to say that my iPhone 4 is completely fixed and working flawlessly within 24 hour of contacting the right person thanks to this thread 🙂 thanks so much Darrell at Apple

My phone has been fixed! I called apple support yesterday and when I tried to activate the phone today it let it through without issues. CALL APPLE. THEY CAN HELP!

Hello all, thank you so much for creating this it has helped alot. I have been through what all you have been through as well, I have been dealing with this since Saturday going back and forth with verizon and apple. I just talked with a apple senior and he is now handling everything! mine is a white 16gb Iphone 4s, although we do have a sim card slot on the 4s when you go to your account with verizon there is no where on the account to activate a sim card therefore you can not put on in there. They put an active one in mine and still same problem. Now I am just waiting on a call back from apple!

hi just for an update,make that 5 people now with the same issue..My neice gave me an iphone4 awhile back,just to piddle around with.just this morning i did a reset on the phone,planning to give it to my son for his birthday this sunday..i have the same "SIM REQUIRED"..tried connecting it to itunes,icloud,to reset but nothing..after reading this thread,im wondering if its really worth the headaches to go through all this..im kicking myself in the butt for doing it,now sitting here sighing..This is a white iphone thats 16gigbytes.the phone hasnt been activate in a year .

Hi, I experienced the same issue. Used Chat with Apple Care. Did the update+restore with the first level tech, got escalated to a higher tech. Repeated the the update+restore with him, told that he would have to escalate to an engineer. Got a call back 2 hours later saying there was some incorrect setting with my phone. The next time I updated+restored it did the correct new iPhone setup. Hopefully they with fix the underlying issue so everyone doesn't have to spend hours on the phone with them. My case number was 746635711.

FIXED. I contacted Customer Service via phone - I had to put in the serial number of my CURRENT phone, as there was no way to access the number of the iPhone 4 - and spoke to a lower level guy for a while. Very helpful, he knew about the issue, and we DID attempt a hard reset/reload of the OS (which did not work). He escalated it to a Sr. level dude - Ronald Spears - who was very polite, and very helpful as well. We went through the process once again, he asked a few questions, and then passed the info to an engineer. I got a call back within an hour, and we attempted the setup process again. Unfortunately, I got the same results, both with an Update AND a Restore. No worries; he went back to Engineering, and informed Mr. Scott that we needed warp power NOW. 30 minutes later I got a call back, and again we went through the process. Worked like a charm, no problems at all. He assured me that this was a one-time issue, and that if I ever had to reset the phone again this would not reappear. The first message I got in iTunes was 'The iPhone has been unlocked', and I was able to do a Restore from Backup with no problems. If you are having this problem, you HAVE to call them and go through the process. Until there is a widespread update issued, it appears that these are being dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Good luck to all of you and thanks again to the OP and all the folks who have contributed here.

I just emailed apple support ios diognastics with this issue &the phones meid # hopefully someone will help..thank you for posting this thread and i hope thisissue gets fixed very soon

Does anyone here have an average fix time? Like how long from the first call to the senior rep to getting a call back and a fix?

I started the process at around 9:30 AM CST. Spent roughly 30-40 minutes on the phone between the first and second guy I talked to. Got a call back at approximately 12 noon, spent another half hour, problem wasn't yet resolved. Last call came in at 1:30; 20 minutes later we were done. So - start to finish over the course of about 4 hours. Bear in mind we were not on the phone the entire time, and the bulk of the time we WERE on the phone was spent waiting for the phone to go through the software download/restoration process.

Only from what I read here it took days b4 a proper person was able to handle the case

Sent from my iPhone

For the first couple it took a while, but many Apple reps are now aware of the problem, so if you are lucky it can be resolved with a short phone call and a wait of a few hours.

I too have an iphone 4 that is telling me that I need a SIM card even though there is no slot for it. The phone was working fine before my daughter restored it. The local Verizon store offered no help. I then went to Verizon chat online, I was told that Apple knew of the problem and was creating an update of some sort. His recommendation was to turn the phone off until then. Really. I then called Apple. I was on the phone with them for almost two hours on Sunday, to no avail. My call was then sent to a Senior Tech named Burt who re loaded the updates etc through itunes but the problem still remained. He ultimately stated that it was a problem with my phone and suggested that I take it to Apple and pay $140+ for a service call. I declined because I know full well that it is an Apple problem. I am now about to call them back with my service call number from Sunday and I really hope that you are right that there is a fix and that more technicians now know what to do.

Fixed! I contacted Apple and spoke with a number of people before I was finally forwarded to Lakeshia. I believe she was an engineer. I explained the problem and she stated that she would call back in 24 to 48 hours. In the interim, about 3 hours later, I decided to turn the phone off then turn it back on. When it came back on, it looked different. I was able to set up the phone as a new phone. I avoided the restore from icloud option.... too scared to go that route. The phone works perfectly now. Thanks