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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

    Opening my iPad anywhere and having LTE internet feels
    absolutely God-damn magical. It feels like I'm living
    inside the Matrix. I'm constantly plugged in.

I smiled at this. Non-apple laptops have had a sim slot for years. On ThinkPads, there has been a sim slot on most models for at least ten years. On my dell Latitude 7390 (13") i have one too.

I mean... This is why Apple users are often joked upon: Apple comes ten years late to the party and users joy and spam the web as if it brought the greatest innovation since hot water.

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I haven’t ever met a ThinkPad owner. Can’t remember ever seeing a consumer grade laptop with a SIM card on a store.

That sound of joy is the feature coming into mainstream tech.

Millions of people have a Thinkpad at work. Tech or non tech companies use them every day. Maybe they are not the users themselves but they are exposed to the technology on a daily basis regardless.

>I haven’t ever met a ThinkPad owner.

There's always a huge world outside of one's bubble.

I say that as a software dev in the business for over a decade. Couldn’t it be that the ThinkPad crowd is a smaller bubble? At least the ones with a SIM card.

I don't know, Lenovo and Dell constantly compete for the spot of first supplier of business laptops.

A consumer grade laptop with SIM card at the cost of a Apple product. Oh yeah, easy to find. In doubt, check the business section ;)

The difference, and I am not an Apple fanperson, is that Apple makes it as easy to buy an iPad with a SIM card in it as it is to buy a phone with a SIM card in it. Lenovo does not. In practice, the equivalence is only theoretical. I can buy an LTE iPad at Walmart at 2am on Tuesday (or at least I could prepandemic). Wireless in a ThinkPad is much less straightforward.

Bruh. You can buy literally any ThinkPad (choose your size, choose your spec) then get a ThinkPad-compatible LTE/whatever compatible card off eBay for 50$ or less.

Try doing that (adding/replacing hardware) on an iPad.

It is incredibly hard to buy laptops with LTE. Either they're not even stocked in stores or they have to be shipped direct, sometimes depending on the vagaries of the countries and providers involved.

Source: 11 years at Vodafone doing mobile broadband for enterprises in a previous lifetime. It was MUCH easier with PCMCIA cards, let me tell you...

It’s just like the whole “no wireless less space than the Nomad, lame” comment. Geeks don’t get it.

But the iPad has had a cellular option since 2010.

My iPad has a 30 day stand by time. When it is in stand by, it still gets notifications, it’s instant on, I can granular control which apps can use cellular data.

It has 10+ hours battery life, it’s light, no fan and faster than most laptops.

It’s the totality of the experience.

How exactly Apple comes ten years late to the party, when the first iPad had mobile connectivity ten years ago? Did Toshiba, or Lenovo had tablets with cellular connection 20 years ago?

Maybe Apple came out with iPhone ten years too late as well: not that's a great reason to make fun of Apple users, for sure.

Macbooks don't have cellular modems. iPads have had them for a long time since they are derived from the mobile iOS. Not that anyone should really even care about this - phone tethering works perfectly fine for almost anyone unless you are too lazy to connect to your phone's wifi.

Drains battery. I can easily work all day on a T480 with LTE, I doubt that a Macbook could last that long while simultainously charging an Iphone (drains very quickly when I use it as a hotspot)

Way back in 2013 an iPad could last over 24 hours on one battery charge as a hotspot.

https://www.imore.com/yup-ipad-air-still-gets-24-hours-batte...

I doubt the newer iPads would perform worse.

My Toshiba laptop from 2006 has build in cellular modem. It is pretty common.

On the other hand, laptops (especially Windows ones) have a horrendous battery life compared to an iPad.

That seems to have been changing quite a bit in the last couple of years. Just look at the Zephyrus 14.

The iPad and iPad Pro advertise “up to 10 hours of battery life”. Many laptops advertise, and get, more than this. (As an example, my Surface Book can just get 12h on light usage, and when it was new I could get 14h if I was a little bit careful. They advertised it as up to 12h. As it stands, I tend to prefer performance to battery life, so I leave it on the better or best performance power profiles, often using it fairly heavily, e.g. compiling Rust code, and so I tend to get only 5–8h. If thrashing it truly as hard as I can, recording high-quality video so that CPU and dGPU are both working at close to 100% the whole time, I can drain the battery in around 3h.)

I'm getting 8-16 hours depending on use from my T480, and that's 2 CPU generations behind. I expect 20h+ from the new Ryzens.

Last time I saw an air card in a laptop, you had to turn it off whenever you sleeped the computer to save battery life (because it would die in your bag) and the connection took a long time to boot. That was in 2011 or so though, is it better today?

I mean its a minor point in a long article...

Its the first one.

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