A journey to find a physical SIM slot iPhone 15 Pro Max.

When the iPhone 15 Pro Max launched, I was ecstatic, as I was every year. I had pre-ordered 3 different colors: Blue Titanium, White Titanium, and Natural Titanium. Black was completely out of the question. I didn’t really want a dark color at the time since I had a purple 14 Pro Max for a whole year, and I really was leaning towards one of the lighter colors. 

When I got the 3 phones on launch day, I was distraught between two beautiful phones, the white and the natural. I loved the back of the natural, but I really loved the sides of the white titanium. 

The slightly yellow tinge of the natural titanium looked like someone pissed on the white titanium phone. 

The funny thing is, if I only got the natural phone, I wouldn’t know that the white phone would have a better sheen to it, and I would just be perfectly happy with the natural color. I don’t live close to an Apple store (about an hour away from the closest one), and I didn’t feel like waiting in line, so I had to buy them for myself to make sure I picked the color that would resonate well with me. I finalized my decision to keep the white titanium and to return the other two. 

I was at the time with AT&T, and have been with them forever. I have been getting a shoddy signal at work for the last 9 years, but it didn't really bother me since I would use my company’s Wi-Fi. It would be annoying at times though when I had to either make or receive phone calls from work, and I would have to stand outside to have a conversation. I could go to Verizon and pay more money, but I didn’t feel it was worth the extra cash, especially in today’s environment where everything is already going up in price. 

I thought to myself, “I have this brand new iPhone 15 Pro Max, and I get the same crap reception as my iPhone SE (1st gen) in the same building. Surely there must be a way to get a better provider for at least the same price.”

And then I remembered a friend of mine telling me that he was paying $10/month for unlimited everything with his Ting plan through a promotion he received. The catch was that you have to be a Ting home internet customer. Since I do have Ting as my home internet provider, I thought to myself to check their website to see if they still had this insane promo for only $10/month.

As it turns out, they still had the promo active, and I decided to try a line. Worst case, it won’t be any good and I’ll just be out $10. I had a feeling though that it would be great since they are using Verizon's towers. 

I ordered a SIM, and it arrived in 2 days. Pretty seamless process, and I just inserted the SIM into my iPhone SE. When I went to work the next day, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw my iPhone SE having near full bars, and my 15 Pro Max stuttering along with just one bar. I tried it out for a few days, and I was able to even make video facetime calls over cellular at work, whereas with AT&T, I couldn’t even make regular voice calls!

So now the choice was obvious. Either I continue to pay $130/month with AT&T for 3 lines, or I could pay $36/month (about 12 bucks a line after taxes and fees) and save myself $94 dollars a month. This was a huge savings, especially once again in today’s inflated greedy economy where every corporation can keep raising prices because, who's there to stop them? 

This was the clearest no-brainer for me in a long time. I still couldn’t believe that I would be getting unlimited data, unlimited hotspot, and no throttling.

There was one catch though, a HUGE catch. 

And that catch would send me for a search halfway around the world.

The catch was that Ting only supports physical SIM cards, and does not support eSIM. That means that any US version of the iPhone 14 or later would not be supported. 

The timing couldn’t be better though. I was planning a trip overseas to Makkah and Madinah for a religious pilgrimage, along with a family wedding, and it was coming up in a few weeks. I had to get packed for this trip, but now I also had to rush to send back my iPhones since I knew that they would be no use to me without a physical SIM slot. As much as I loved my iPhone 15 Pro Max in white titanium, it was time to part with it. Saving $94/month is just too good of a deal to keep an inferior provider. Plus if I didn’t return them in time, I would be over the return timeframe and would be stuck with over $4,000 in iPhones.

I did some research on Apple’s Saudi website to see where I could buy a phone, but the stores it told me were all saying that availability was sold out. There didn’t seem to be a reliable way for me to acquire this elusive iPhone 15 Pro Max with a SIM slot. 

I also had to set my priorities straight. This trip was after all a spiritual trip first and foremost, and since there will be a lot of family present, there were dinner plans every day, along with other activities that would take up a lot of my time. The average amount of sleep on trips like these is about 4 hours, maybe 5. Of course there were the 5 daily prayers that would be prayed at the Grand Mosques, so I would have to find time in between one of the prayers to somehow acquire a phone. 

Needless to say, time was extremely limited.

Before I could even do that, I needed a local SIM card since I had no service with Ting and the hotel Wi-Fi was a complete joke. Ting’s international plans are pretty expensive, and even if I wanted to activate it, it wouldn’t work in Saudi since I kept getting “No Service” in the status bar. The local SIM plans are pretty cheap, and I was able to get a 15GB plan for about $17.

Now I was finally connected to the world once again, so I could do some casual research to see where some of the cell phone provider stores were located. Later in the day, I had an epiphanic moment, “Fahad you idiot, why don’t you just ask the guys who sold you the SIM card where to buy an iPhone 15 Pro Max instead of trying to do the research yourself? They’re the locals, so they would definitely know!”

Since the teenagers who set me up with the plan spoke English (albeit, just enough to get by), I went back to them and asked them point blank, “Where can I buy… iPhone 15 Pro?” I said it just like that, leaving out the “an,” to come down to their level of speech. It’s a thing you do if you speak multiple languages. They immediately told me to go to the Jarir Bookstore. I said, “A bookstore?” They said, “Yes!”

First I thought to myself that they might have misheard me since I was not looking for books, but apparently Jarir Bookstore is like THE place to buy a phone. It never showed up as an official Apple retailer when I searched their Saudi website, but that website honestly didn’t seem that reliable to begin with. 

I googled this store, and it wasn’t that far from my hotel, maybe around 15 minutes. 

So my last day in Madinah was the day I would go to this store. My brother and I went after breakfast time, which was prime nap time, but sleep would have to wait for this iPhone 15 Pro Max, if they even had one. I couldn’t really call in advance since they weren’t open yet, but I would just have to bite the bullet and pray they had one.

We were able to flag a taxi pretty easily, as the taxi drivers are plentiful, ready to take you wherever you want to go. We had a couple of stops before the bookstore since they weren’t open yet, but once we got there at 8:45am, we just had to wait till 9am for them to open.

It was quite a grand store that could be best described as a mix between Barnes and Noble, Best Buy, and Target. Needless to say it was my favorite store, filled with all kinds of tech. Time wouldn’t allow me to peruse through the whole store, but I just had to get down to business.

I initially went to a booth that looked like a Best Buy Apple display area, but there was no one there to help me. Looking at where all the salespeople were, I turned my eye towards the counter that had practically all the latest Android smartphones from all the brands that are not mainstream in the US: Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Huawei. But it was time to see where the real phones were. Where were the iPhones?!

Instead of looking like a panther trying to catch its next meal, I decided to simply ask the gentleman at the counter without sounding desperate, “Do you guys have the iPhone 15 Pro Max in stock?” I was physically normal in my appearance, but mentally I was flinching to see what they would say. This could literally be my only chance to get this phone, since I would be leaving the following day to go to Makkah.

They did have some in stock! Now it was up to me to see if I wanted to purchase from what they had. At this point, beggars can’t be choosers. My goal was to get a 256GB or even 512GB white or natural titanium, but I might go with another color if I had to.

It seems that the popularity of the white and natural titanium phones is not only a US phenomenon, and the only phones they had were in blue or black with 512GB. They had a regular Pro in natural titanium at 1TB, but I wanted that 5x telephoto zoom.

I decided to go for the Black Titanium 512GB phone because I remember someone saying on Twitter-X that the black phone provides the most immersive experience with the edges disappearing into the color of the side rails. It was a $300 premium over the same phone if I had bought it in the United States, so that SIM card slot literally cost me $300.

I was still a bit nervous after purchasing the device because you can’t return anything here unless it has a defect. There is no return for buyer’s remorse.

Once I got back to the hotel, I unboxed the Black Titanium, and I was in awe of how the brushed metallic finish looked in black. It was better than I had imagined. Yeah it picks up fingerprints, but they can easily be wiped off with my shirt to reveal that shimmery brushed titanium. The look of the Black Titanium with natural light also gives a very striking graphite color that reminds me of a shiny pencil tip. I almost feel like if I rub the phone on paper, it will start writing!

Direct sunlight also shows off one of the titanium phone’s secrets: that lustrous particulate sheen. Under most lighting, the phone looks like brushed metal, but when under direct sunlight, it’s almost as if there is another texture that becomes active in the harsher light. The hue also changes a bit and you can almost see the whitish titanium underneath it, or maybe that’s just my slight desire to want this phone to be white.

Overall, I am glad I was able to get the Black Titanium, even though it wasn’t my first choice. The phone also worked flawlessly out of the box with no issues, so I wasn’t going to have to go through the whole return process. The Blue Titanium that I purchased on launch day did have a slight chip or discoloration on the back panel near the bottom, but this phone was flawless. 

A story like this wouldn’t be complete if there weren’t some other plot twists, and there was a twist right at the end of my trip. While I was walking in the airport to find my gate for my flight back to Dulles airport, there was a Jarir Bookstore in the airport itself, and I decided to just ask the guy and see if they had a white titanium iPhone 15 Pro Max in stock.

Of course they did. 512GB too!