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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

Has there been any recent discussions as to why Apple still hasn't introduced cellular connectivity on their laptops? Is it yet another attempt to get people to convert over to the walled garden of iOS? With every ipadOS iteration, they push it to be closer and closer to a desktop experience (windows, monitor support, keyboard trackpad cover, etc).

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As sibling alluded to, they don't want to pay the per device royalty percentage, especially on high price devices like a MacBook Pro.

Maybe once the apple designed 5g chips are ready. Maybe they’ll be a little more battery friendly. And apple will either have to negotiate something worthwhile with carriers or start their own mobile network to keep the data prices reasonable. None of the current carriers offer data plans suitable for full time laptop use.

I'd wager it's a Qualcomm negotiation thing.

Modern WWAN might be a bit of a nightmare. I'm not super familiar with recent efforts in the space, but if Apple wanted to knock this out of the park, they'd need two things:

- Unlimited data plans, preferably at a non-insane price (sub $50-month would be nice)

- Both 4G LTE and 5G connectivity. Not just one or the other.

Both of these seem technically possible, but I'd assume they'd be incredibly difficult to pull-off from a business negotiation perspective.

Why does Apple need to provide the plan as well? I mean, given Apple's controlling nature, they may well wish to - but most laptops with mobile internet simply provide a SIM slot hooked up to a standard mobile baseband. Customers find their own plan, and many carriers offer plans which are tablet-oriented, with no calls/texts and sharing the data from a 'master' mobile plan.

Not sure how this is much different from an iPad Pro, either.

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