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Comment by tpetry | Hacker News Reader

Theres really no great need in 4g for macbooks? I mean you can activate your wifis hotspot with handoff directly from your macbook without ever touching your iphone.

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assuming you have an iphone, and it has plenty of battery...at one point after using the hotspot for a while my iphone showed a temperature warning, and I had to wait for it to cool off before I could use it again.

Having the laptop battery and cooling would be much better

And internet sharing makes a lot more sense FROM a computer to a handheld than vice versa

You need the modem within a mobile phone, but now you're adding it to a laptop in addition. It isn't clear it makes more sense to me.

You could argue that perhaps the computer shouldn't have built in WiFi either - after all, it could tether to a phone (via a cable or Bluetooth) to use wi-fi.

Except WiFi modems are cheap because there is lots of competition and most of the patents are easy to license, so everything has WiFi now.

For me to have 4G access, I need to connect to a network, and for that I need to pay. I currently do this through my phone which I need to be connected when there is no wifi more than my laptop. Is the price of 4G access low enough to have this on my laptop in addition to my phone? Not currently.

On Google Fi it’s no additional charge.

Man, I use the hotspot function of my iPhone all the time and never have heat issues. I wonder why?

Probably a combination of what surface you have it sitting on and which case you use (if any).

And ambient temperature and air movement. Anything that impacts heat dissipation.

I was in Phoenix AZ last week when it was 115F and my phone’s hotspot shut down because the phone got too hot.

You were outside? I mean...

Not exactly outside, but in a building without air conditioning yes.

Yes it was awful.

Probably because you're close to whatever tower it's connecting to and the radio bits are not having to spend a bunch of energy screaming at the top of their lungs to be heard by the tower.

Even plastic clad android phones will get hot if you try and make a long phone call from BFE.

also the Mac may detect it as a metered mobile connection and defer/throttle background usage (updates, etc).

> assuming you have an iphone

Any phone can do that, not only iPhones. How often are you on the move without a phone?

Also the battery argument is not so definitive since a laptop on 4G/5G would also consume battery. If you can connect your laptop to a wall outlet you can connect your phone too.

Apple has investigated this over the years, even getting as far as building a red board prototype 3G MacBook Pro in 2007:

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-wants-its-3g-macbook-prototy...

(Green and blue boards tend to be for production-ready prototypes, red is fairly hacked together.)

I believe the objections are 50:50 software-related and battery. How do you set suitable data usage thresholds on a Mac which is running over a 3/4/5G LTE network? The thermal performance of MacBook Pro is already weak at the high end and battery life suffers.

I would be surprised if, when Apple switches to its own power efficient chipset in its portable Mac line, they don't offer a BTO option which includes cellular capabilities through a built-in SIM.

It’s not hard to write something that kills an interface shortly after the transmitted data crosses a threshold (I’ve done it multiple times for myself.) I’m still surprised apple has refused to add this to any of their OSes.

Assumes you have wifi hotspots in range and an iphone that's configured correctly with adequate battery.

the phone would be a wifi hotspot, sharing it's 4g connection with the laptop, via wifi.

Or if you don't have much battery, you can kill two birds with one stone by plugging the phone into the laptop and tethering over USB while charging it.

or you could buy a laptop with 4g :P

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