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

If it was a basic phone, it was not a 4G LTE phone. No need to do any research.

So as far as I am concerned, there is 100% nothing wrong with this phone. I think it has something to do with the full erase but I sure as heck cannot figure it out. And so far, neither can anyone at Apple or Verizon ... and no one at either company is willing to even try any more.

Restoring a phone can stress a phone that is already on the edge of having a problem. The phone tends to get hotter than it ordinarily would and be doing much more work. Frustrating but it does happen.

The amount of time (and therefore) money involved in trying to figure out what is wrong with the phone would far exceed the value of an older, out-or-warranty phone. You're best be would be to approach Verizon and see what options they might have for getting your son new phone. If you're absolutely certain you won't be wanting to get an out-of-warranty replacement from Apple, you could take the phone to a third party repair service. If it were me, I wouldn't, though. I wouldn't find it worth spending the money on a phone that old.

Best of luck.

I'm sorry, but I find your answer -- that this is a "natural death" of sorts for phones -- highly unlikely for a few reasons:

• All of us reporting this have the same phone,
• On the same carrier (Verizon),
• And I suspect, all of us recently made line changes. For me, I ported the phone's mobile number to an AT&T MVNO a few days before restoring the phone. Another user reported this happening around the time they were making a line change as well.

My guess is there is something going on at the intersection of Verizon and Apple. A change to a system on one side, perhaps, leading to an unexpected consequence on the other.

The phone in question for me was never abused or subjected to ill-treatment; never jailbroken; in fact, had very little use except for corporate email, SMS and phone. My wife abhors smartphones and used her as minimally as required for her job. Frankly, I would like to reclaim some of the value in the asset by reusing it or selling it, but I obviously cannot do so with it in a hung state like this.

It's borderline absurd to think that multiple users would have exactly the same non-sensical error -- a phone that cannot accept a SIM card, heck, a phone without any GSM capabilities at ALL -- under the same circumstances, on the same carrier, due to a random hardware error or "heat" happening to us all at the same time.

I'm willing to go along with your discussion, but I would ask you this; how is it something between Verizon and Apple. I'm not defending Apple here, nor am I trying to bash Verizon. To me, the error seems to be on Verizon's side, and with your added explanation, I think that supports it somewhat. However, I would be interested in your factors in determining your hypothesis. The only thing that I disagree with somewhat is your statement about it being borderline absurd, since there are only 3 of you reporting here, compared to the number of iPhone 4 sold and activated through Verizon. Even if you were to consider yourself a random sampling, the statistic would be so small, it would be difficult to measure.

I agree there is something going on, and dealing with computers, I can also understand what Meg said about the device having trouble handling the update. It seems that is also some of the causation factor for the Wi-Fi issues with the iPhone 4s. Again, I'm more interested in how you are developing your hypothesis.

ksdavis27701 wrote:

All of us reporting this have the same phone,

All of us? So far, there are three of you in this thread. Although your problems are extremely frustrating, you still don't constitute a statistically significant number of people. I think I may have seen one other, not particularly busy thread on this issue.

I'm not denying you have a problem. What I am saying is that you have phones that have reached the ends of their useful lives. Generally, modern electronic devices work fine until they don't. They don't have the slow decline of an old car. Yes, it's theoretically possible that it could be some sort of glitch in Verizon's system. But, there are a ton of iPhone 4's still out there being used and re-used. II believe Verizon still sells reconditioned ones for their prepaid service. So, I'm going with the odds here.

Verizon has a trade-in program. It only requires that the phone be in good physical condition and be able to be turned on. Of course, you won't get a whole lot for a phone that old. It's just not worth much.

That wouldn't make sense unless they removed all iPhone 4 MEID's. I'm still reading over the new pages of this thread as I'm talking to both Apple and Verizon reps but I do have some news. The Apple rep pretty much flat out told the Verizon rep that the issue was caused by them! The Verizon rep didn't argue. She now let him get off the line so that she could get her global support on the line with me. Apparently, the Apple rep believes the issue came when Verizon pushed out it's new policy to unlock the iPhones. The glitch comes from the fact that their iPhone 4's never came with SIM trays and thus were never meant to be unlocked, so they get an unlock order and now they believe they are GSM phones. My biggest question now is, how the **** did the phone even know to receive the new policy when all i did was reset the phone? Maybe some type of over the air thing? But it really would only make sense to me if I got on Verizon's network somehow, which I didn't! weird. This is so stressful. I can't believe the jerk at the Apple store tried to tell you it was a bad phone!

"restoring a phone can stress it"?????? smh. Somebody quick, give this guy a genius badge!

So the end of an iPhone 4's life looks like a SIM Required message? That's just stupid. The only thing that would make an iPhone, or any other phone, ask for a SIM card is the instructions it receives from its firmware. I'm no computer genius but it doesn't take a genius to understand that heat nor old age are going to make a phone to magically spit out commands it was never programmed to even have.

Update: Verizon got a hold of their global support. Of course they claim no culpability. They say they have no way of pushing out that unlock request or to undo it. Now I'm on hold while she gets Apple back on the line. I'm beyond trying to fix this issue. My main concern now is to try and narrow it down to one of the two and have that one pay me 140 bucks so i can go buy an iPhone 4 or flat out give me an iPhone 4. This is ridiculous, I payed over 600 bucks for it, someone should take responsibility, what's 140 bucks to them??

Also, I realize there are only 3 people with the issue here but it is a real issue, not the phone just reaching the end of its life. I honestly think far more people have just tossed it or flat out gave up. The first few hours I tried fixing it on my own, try googling this issue.... it's almost impossible! You first have to weed out hundreds of results trying to teach you how to activate stolen phones. Try calling Apple... you first have to pay 30 bucks, understandably, but not everyone has 30 bucks to spend like that. Try calling Verizon... they'll tell you to call Apple.

Like Rosindabow, very long time user of Apple products. And, a long-time analyst, manager and senior manager in enterprise IT for two of the top organizations in my field. (One of my roles involved implementing change management and a CAB in a very large organization, and the reason I alluded earlier to the "intersection" of Apple and VZ is this has all the feeling of an edge case emanating from unexpected consequences of a change.) I've used technology long enough to differentiate a PEBKAC from a real issue, particularly when there are multiple of reasonable people with similar symptoms.

Rosindabow: has either Apple or VZ assigned a case number to you? It would be helpful if we could share those cases as tier 3/4/etc. support staff will benefit from being able to cross-reference our individual incidents.

I couldn't get an Apple Store appointment until tomorrow and went to Verizon today. I had followed the DFU method recommended in another thread on this issue but the VZ call center (to whom the in-store agent immediately passed the case) wanted me to try recovery mode. Did not end up with a case opened since did not progress past the first tier. Trying the restore mode now, albeit with dim hopes.

Well, as I suspected, the Recovery Mode presented exactly the same error: "There is no SIM card installed in the iPhone you are attempting to activate."

No time to wait at VZ again (an hour last time.) Have an appointment at the Apple Store tomorrow, will bring along this printed thread and ask for their help.

If you re-connect with VZ or Apple and they do open a case, please share it back here and I will do likewise.

I wish I would have read this response earlier, I would have asked the Apple rep I'm in touch with now for a case number. Last I spoke with an Apple rep, it was about noon, the same time I last posted here. Let me give you all I know for now and I'll try to get you a case number tomorrow, but first, I don't recommend you go up to the Apple store unless you're willing to spend many hours there and not give up, otherwise you will have wasted all the hours you spent up there. So here's my full case so far: I had an iPhone 4 I bought way back when they had first came out. I bought it through Verizon along with the plan I was required to purchase. When my contract was up, I didn't renew it, I went to T-Mobile and the iPhone basically became an iPod (no cellular service). Fast forward to yesterday, we were getting ready to celebrate my youngest son's 4 year old birthday. He's always begging to play on our phones and iPads and he can use them VERY well. So the wife and I had talked about giving him the old iPhone 4. It was pristine, no cracks in the glass, no dents in the aluminum from dropping it, pristine. Well the morning of the party, I turn it on, go through the photos one more time and texts and attachments. Ultimately, the wife says it can all go because she already backed those pics up years ago. I go into settings, reset and erase all content so that he can start fresh, when it reboots: Hello Slide to set up, English, Select your Region United States, Choose WiFi network, it may take a few minutes to activate your phone.... SIM Required. Connecting it to iTunes only prompted iTunes to display a similar message. I then spent HOURS researching online. Finally I called Apple and payed the 30 bucks. I will say this, No Apple Rep was ever rude or blew me off. The rep was stumped though. He said he would hand it over to his supervisor. The supervisor got on and gave me her contact info, etc. and, as before, we tried reseting it, upgrading it, restoring it, DFU mode, recovery mode, everything. In the end, I was able to successfully upgrade my phone to iOS 7.1.2 i think it was, the max for iPhone 4, but it made no difference. Finally, after hours and some call backs, the rep said she was stumped and needed to consult with her engineers. She later called back and refunded my 30 bucks, she said it all boiled down to me calling Verizon and having them activate it. So, I called Verizon. I wanted them to activate my phone and I didn't want to pay any fees for it. They didn't like that idea. Finally, after many hours, one rep explained to me that I could call and start a new plan, then cancel it the same day and I would be refunded the 35 dollar activation fee and basically no harm done, I don't pay a dime. Cool. So NOW, for the first time since I had successfully completed my contract with Verizon back when, I tried to actually activate service for the phone in an attempt to get past this error. They asked for my MEID number, took down all my information, gave me the green light, and asked me to activate my phone by dialing *22890 and selecting the first option. No go. Once again, brick wall. Once again, they were all stumped. I actually spoke with one guy who gave me instructions on how to eject the SIM tray. There is no SIM tray on this phone! He chuckled and said, there IS a SIM tray on the left edge. I wanted to reach through the phone and smack him with the tray-less iPhone! Finally, after talking to a few other people, it made it to someone a little higher up the chain and in the end she took down my info and agreed to call me today so that we could both get Apple on the phone. Today, she called me back up and we got an Apple rep on the line. He looked through his information and found something about an unlock policy that was last pushed through Verizon and believed this to be the issue being as how the Verizon iPhone 4 was specifically built to never be unlocked so from what I gathered, some kind of mass update to unlock phones was pushed and phones without that capability were just wrapped up into the mix and so now you have a strictly CDMA phone thinking it's a GSM phone. At this point, the Apple rep was let go from the line and now the Verizon rep put me on hold so that she could get a hold of global support and discuss these new findings. She then came back on the line and explained to me that after speaking with her global support, Verizon has no way of pushing out any sort of unlock policy nor do they have any way of reversing that and the issue was something only Apple could resolve. So now she got Apple back on the line. The new Apple rep got on the line and gave me all his contact info before proceeding to verify a few things. First he asked if the phone was attached to a phone number. It was explained that technically yes but it was still not officially activated. He said, perfect. He started to ask me to restore it but then found his notes and saw ALL the MANY attempts that had been already tried. He then told the Verizon rep that she no longer needed to be on the line. I kinda freaked out and was like, no way, if you tell me I have to call Verizon then I'm back to square 1. He told me not to worry, he would be that bridge if that were the case. Then all he asked me to do was to hit the little "information" icon found on the Hello page. A little blue "i" in a circle. All this showed was my MEID number and I confirmed it. Then he said he was writing a ticket up to the engineers and would give me a call back as soon as he got the next word, which would be anywhere from 4 to 24 hours. So I think I've covered it all. Feel free to ask me any other questions. One peculiar thing I found, though nobody else seems to think anything of it. When the phone is put in to recovery mode and plugged into iTunes, a message should appear saying something along the lines of, a device in recovery mode has been detected you have to restore it before it can be used, something like that, I've seen it before on other devices. Well not this one, what pops up is a message reading along the lines of, there is a problem with the phone. The problem may be resolved by updating it but if it persists you may have to restore it. Weird. But even weirder was that no Apple rep even seemed surprised by this message. But then again, maybe it's not so weird, maybe it's common. I don't know. Other than that, I think that's all that is pertinent. I hope this helps you, if nothing else I hope this cuts many hours of getting pushed around. Don't let them tell you that it's as easy as calling Verizon to have them activate it. Don't let them tell you it was just the end of your phones life cycle or that it's because of an unlock policy that Verizon has to reverse. I'll continue to update this thread regularly with ANY and ALL information I can find. I LOVE Apple products and the Apple community.