iPhone 8 Plus and eSIM: no chip, but a tray that still earns its keep

Short version

The iPhone 8 Plus, released in 2017, has no eSIM. Apple's first eSIM iPhones — the XR, XS and XS Max — arrived in 2018. The hardware is absent, so no update or setting will produce it.

What the 8 Plus does have is a nano-SIM tray, and by 2026 that is the more interesting half of the sentence.

Most 8 Pluses are now somebody's second phone

Nine years on, this handset is rarely anyone's only phone. It gets handed down, kept as a spare, given to a child, thrown in a bag as the phone you would rather lose than your current one. That changes what the eSIM question is actually about.

Nobody with an 8 Plus as their backup needs it to hold a travel data plan. They need it to be genuinely useful when it is the phone in their pocket — which, thanks to the tray, it can be.

Using it as a dedicated travel handset

This is the case where an old 8 Plus is worth more than its resale value.

Put a local prepaid SIM in the 8 Plus at your destination and carry it as the phone you use outdoors — maps, taxis, translation, photos you don't mind losing. Leave your main phone on your home number, on Wi-Fi, in the hotel or deep in a bag. If the travel phone is stolen or drowned, you have lost an old handset and a prepaid SIM with a few pounds on it, not your banking apps and your primary number.

Two things make this work:

• Unlock it first. An 8 Plus bought on contract may still be locked to the seller's network, and a locked phone will not accept a foreign SIM. Any contract on it is long paid off, so the carrier should release it on request.
• Set it up at home. Sign into the accounts you actually need, install your maps and messaging apps, download offline maps. Doing that on a hotel connection on day one is a waste of a day.

Which local SIM to buy is a country-by-country question — our destination guides cover what the networks charge and whether ID is required to register.

Buying an 8 Plus second-hand right now

If you are thinking of picking one up cheaply for this purpose, check three things before paying:

1. Carrier lock. Ask directly, then test with a SIM from another network.
2. Battery health. A travel phone that dies at 3pm is not a travel phone.
3. The tray itself. It should have the pin hole and an intact tray. A missing or damaged tray on a handset with no eSIM leaves you with a device that cannot connect to a mobile network at all.

Do not pay a premium for one that a listing claims supports eSIM. It does not, and that is a signal about the rest of the description.

Making sure, on the handset in your hand

Dial *#06#. If an EID appears next to the IMEI, there is eSIM hardware. On an 8 Plus it will not appear.

That check matters most when you are not certain which model you are holding. The 8 Plus and the later Plus and Max models are easy to mix up in a drawer, and some of the later ones do have eSIM. Settings, then General, then About will tell you the model name outright. Our phone compatibility checker covers the rest of the range if you need to look up something else.

If it is still your main phone

Then nothing above applies and the advice is simpler: you are not missing much. Buy a local prepaid SIM when you arrive, which is often cheaper per gigabyte than the travel eSIMs you cannot use anyway, and check your carrier's roaming rate before you leave in case it is already covered.

The moment to replace the handset is when the battery or the software support stops being acceptable — not because a chip is missing. If you do replace it, the iPhone XR is the earliest model with eSIM, and everything from that generation kept a tray as well.