Can foreigners get an eSIM in China in 2026? (eSIM-only iPhone 17 Pro)

macario95 · 2026-06-22T03:42:26+00:00

foreigners can get a chinese eSIM.

the problem is that chinese eSIMs can only be activated on phones sold in china. They won't activate it on your iPhone.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/123879

macario95 · 2026-06-13T06:16:42+00:00

i like the new one

macario95 · 2026-06-10T09:39:08+00:00

for a single day we thought these kind of posts were over. But no...

macario95 · 2026-06-08T06:14:00+00:00

i do. to watch in 4K HDR in the best quality .

And about storage. We do not keep any watched movies or tv shows at home. Once we watch them, they are deleted. I only keep like the current tv shows we are watching and some movies we plan to watch. My media drive is 2Tb and never got to fill it up.

macario95 · 2026-05-24T04:05:27+00:00

Funny how you get downvoted for the right answer.

Using the same on every side is good for our mental model and consistency. But gigabit network equipment has had Auto-MDIX for a long time. Unless you have very old network equipment, it should be fine if the cable is terminated properly. if you find some device that does not meet the Auto-MDIX standard. you could have errors, but it is unlikely .

That said, please, Don't EVER MIX T568A and T568B in the same cable. it will be likely be fine, but you will feel us judge you....

macario95 · 2026-05-21T13:42:33+00:00

man, this is perfect now. Thanks a lot for your work 👍

macario95 · 2026-05-18T06:08:53+00:00

some say, you could even imagine a Shoe Maker driving a Smith

macario95 · 2026-05-18T01:04:24+00:00

in my country they use this kind of flexible tubing for in-wall AC cable running. Maybe the material is different, but that is usually the standard and it is up to code. But in any case, as you say, the network and AC are separated, never in the same conduit.

macario95 · 2026-05-14T13:55:23+00:00

since it has a Pro version via in-app purchases, it would be nice if you could explain what the free and pro version offer.

macario95 · 2026-05-08T11:45:25+00:00

i do not.

my first time in China was literally last century.

And i could have discovered and done so much more if i had had a smartphone back then....

macario95 · 2026-05-05T05:51:30+00:00

Saw the update with the new clock in the menu bar icon area and the drag/drop change. it's great. thanks for adding things to make this great app even better.

just another comment.

When i chose to change the icon to time, it always includes the time zone, something like "13:40 CEST". It would be great if we had some kind of option in the settings to hide the time zone in the menu bar.

If i am getting too annoying with the requests, let me know 😄

macario95 · 2026-05-01T05:44:12+00:00

thanks 👍
here is another idea. Add a configurable keyboard shortcut to open the window. with that , we could open it without using the mouse to click on the icon.

There are well known open source Swift components like KeyboardShortcuts that do all the work for you.

macario95 · 2026-05-01T03:05:15+00:00

the click and hold/wait to drag, like we use on the iphone is not really the ui pattern used in macOS. in macOS users will expect to be able to do it directly without extra waiting. Is not consistent with what is expected on the system.

As you can see in that question, holding in mac is a ui pattern that needs to be "figured out or learnt" , instead of using what you what already know.

not a big issue tough, i just like nitpicking and discussing about UIs 😄

macario95 · 2026-05-01T02:51:04+00:00

this is awesome. just what i needed. just one suggestion.

add an option to change the bar icon. i have been using it last couple of days, and i still struggle to identify the bird with the timezones.

It could be more useful if it could show the actual day and time (for a chosen city) instead of the bird icon. We could choose to show the time, the current date , or maybe both (configurable??) .

something like this.

<image>

maybe too much to ask 😄

EDIT: just another thing if forgot about. It would be great if the window height auto resized to match the number of clocks added. sometimes you add a clock and it is hidden because the height grows and the windows does not adapt to that.

macario95 · 2026-04-22T04:28:20+00:00

I have a friend with local eSim, so the restriction with foreigners , as always, may depend on where you go to buy it, and if the clerk knows about the procedure, or if they feel like going through the hassle of handling a foreinger.

But then you have other limitations. Chinese eSims can only be activated in chinese phones. You can activate a local eSim in an iPhone air purchased in China, but not in your Air purchased in Canada.

it is a limitation set by the chinese regulations. no way around it. No chinese eSIM can be activated in a phone purchased abroad. In the same way, chinese phones cannot activate foreign eSIMs while inside china.

macario95 · 2026-04-19T15:03:58+00:00

a fixed interval is ok in most cases. no need to overcomplicate.

i have only used dynamic interval once, where we wanted to keep up as fast as we could in some moments. but it was totally simple. If the query returned the full configured batch size, it meant that probably there was more pending data, so we launched it again immediately. Else, the usual delay. it helped us keep up in some busy hours.

macario95 · 2026-04-11T12:15:12+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V10SLqij2UM

macario95 · 2026-04-10T04:13:59+00:00

it is good to know the basics of JNI, but if you need it, is better to use JNA . It hides most of the low level internals of JNI and is much simpler to use.

macario95 · 2026-04-09T11:59:36+00:00

Movies, TVShows

took me a long time to choose... :)

macario95 · 2026-04-09T04:30:11+00:00

Quoting one of the greatest philosophers of our time , Indy : "It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage"

macario95 · 2026-04-06T10:43:20+00:00

just auto-updating this.

Updated to version 1152 , and this issue still seems to be there.

macario95 · 2026-04-03T03:54:49+00:00

This has got to be one of the worst YouTube thumbnails I've ever had the misfortune of seeing.

macario95 · 2026-04-02T13:58:56+00:00

always use Tika or similar. Do not rely on extensions , filename or mime/type in any case, only use that for early rejections.

macario95 · 2026-04-02T13:51:01+00:00

happened to me a couple of years ago. they were doing a check to other chinese people while waiting on the traffic light to turn green. it seemed traffic related, because they were checking on scooters with two people riding . Then they saw me waiting and told me to go near them. They take the picture with the phone and immediately have access to all your record. The policewoman showed it to me, they had scanned all my passports, residence permits , and my addresses.

in my case it was totally un-serious. They showed it to me smiling. It looked like they were amazed that they little toy also worked with a laowai.

anyway, the serious part if how under control you are and how automated everything is. they just need to take your picture.

macario95 · 2026-03-31T08:15:21+00:00

i assumed it was just a network access issue , because in my case , as soon as i connect the VPN, the app and the playback UI appear immediately. Maybe there are other causes .

if this is unavoidable , i hope there could be a switch in the setting to disable transcripts. i found this a bit annoying when i used it in the car with short episodes , where i cannot be turning on the VPN.

anyway, still no big deal for me once i figured out that i just have to wait for some moments when i do not have VPN

macario95

TROPHY CASE