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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Tethering to iPhone is extremely easy, what’s the point? You don’t even have to set it up, the system just suggests it as an option in the Wi-Fi menu.

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Qualcomm modem license is relatively expensive for a laptop. I suspect that, once Apple is ready to launch their own modem, they will include that in their laptops, too.

It disconnects whenever the laptop enters sleep mode, it causes the phone to run very hot and consume lots of battery and, yes, it requires manual intervention before it can be used.

I agree that overall these are probably small issues, but built-in mobile network access would have usability benefits

With a MacBook internal modem would you then have to purchase another 5G plan and a sim or pay extra for including that in your phone plan? I would imagine it’s not cheap

In my country there are plans that allow for multiple additional devices to be linked to an account.

I wouldn’t have to pay anything extra for a 5G MacBook.

Which of course makes total sense technically. Because for my mobile operator there’s no difference (bandwidth wise. And given the packet switched nature of LTE and later, that’s all that matters) whether I’m tethering or connecting multiple devices.

Yes, it ends up being very expensive. For an iPad, cellular costs $150 plus ~$20/month.

What manual interventions?

What if I don't have an iPhone?

On Android tethering can be enabled with just a few taps.

I wonder whether this could be automated, e.g. you click on the macOS toolbar and a macOS app communicates with an Android app and the apps do the needed actions in the respective operating systems (enable tethering on Android, connect to the WiFi network from macOS).

There is a setting in developer options to automatically tether when connected to a PC via USB .

And then they sell two devices.

On the other hand, from a user's perspective only one SIM card and data allotment is needed. I much prefer two devices that I would own anyway over two SIM cards with (in most cases) separate monthly subscriptions or data packs.

People won't stop buying phones because their laptops are 5G enabled. The laptop's eSIM would be on the same plan as the phone. It would help carriers to push more expensive plans with much bigger data caps, which is easy with 5G. To the point of eating some home broadband market share- I imagine some people canceling their home broadband like they've cancelled their phone landlines, which initially seemed unthinkable.

Of course they won't stop buying phones, but specifically Apple's phones work very nicely with MacOS.

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