T-Mobile to Charge $5 a Month for iOS 27 iPhone Handoff | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile to Charge $5 a Month for iOS 27 iPhone Handoff

macrumors.com

21 pointsseemaze16 comments

Isn't this strange feature similar to how cellular Apple Watches are implemented?

No, they have their own number and basically it's a little PBX, simultaneous ring, and outbound CID rewriting.

This is about letting the same number exist twice in the network.

I’m not on a supported carrier and I don’t think I’d pay extra for this feature but I would be nice to take a dev phone and temporarily give it my cell plan for testing purposes.

That said, it would require I be signed into my Apple ID on the dev phone as well. Which isn’t out of the question, but normally I like to use a different account for isolation.

I know apple primarily serves to better it's own ecosystem. But if they would have let this handoff feature on android devices, I would have finally considered an iphone for the first time next to my android devicr

Interesting technology, but what is the intended use?

So you can use more than one iPhone as your primary phone. For example, if you have the new iPhone Duo but want to use your other 'standard' iPhone for the telephoto zoom camera capability, you could transfer your phone number from the Duo to that phone for the day if you're going to be out taking a lot of pictures. When you are done, transfer it back to the Duo, and the Duo will become your primary phone again.

So, popping out the SIM and putting it into a different phone, but with extra paid steps?

The promise of eSIMs delivered for only $5/month.

Honestly, a carrier charge for this feature doesn't sound any less reasonable than a variety of other near-zero marginal cost services providers have offered in the past, but $5 seems steep since you can add an entirely separate user to an existing family plan for not much more than $10.

i thought idevice can receive call/sms as long as they are login with same account? I tested it on my ip13mini, ip7+ and macbook.

I think for phone calls this only works on Facetime and for calls maybe only on Wifi.

SMS syncing is true. But if you have a phone and you're out and about you also need mobile data, so would otherwise need a second mobile plan. Or to swap the SIM over, which was easier with a physical SIM, more difficult with eSIMs.

The SMS forwarding is handled entirely within iMessage.

Phone call forwarding works when all the devices are nearby, and they can handoff the audio streams between themselves; but you can't pick up a phone call on your Mac if your phone is on the other side of the world/at the office/etc; the feature we're talking about here would not have this limitation.

>So you can use more than one iPhone as your primary phone. For example, if you have the new iPhone Duo but want to use your other 'standard' iPhone for the telephoto zoom camera capability, you could transfer your phone number from the Duo to that phone for the day if you're going to be out taking a lot of pictures. When you are done, transfer it back to the Duo, and the Duo will become your primary phone again.

Ah, so the functionality that switching the physical SIM card gave you instantly and at no cost at all.

Thanks, I hate it.

Travel is one. Have a daily driver phone that you use at home, and another one with much less personal data that you take across borders.

Wouldn't all the apps, app data, your photos, messages etc be synced between your phones?

Yes, they would be, because you are still logged into your Apple account. You wouldn't use iPhone Handoff for border crossing unless you wanted to leave one phone at home and transfer your number to the iPhone you are taking with you when you leave the country. Still, the phones would have identical data on them unless you turned off syncing for certain apps, such as iMessage (messages).

People who want 2 phones but one number. Seems self explanatory to me

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