alt Hacker News> Would love a 5G MacBook with a data plan.
I thoroughly enjoyed the ATP podcast discussion on this.
Sounds like the base assumption is Apple is incapable of having decent tethering even as they control the whole ecosystem, including special protocols in-between their product they design 100% from hardware to software.
But somehow pushing the modem in the MacBook solves this...because Apple is then good at managing transient network connections in macos, hooking to complex mesh networks on protocols they don't control ?
To my eyes Apple being unable to realize these dreamlike expectations is probably the very reason MacBooks don't have modems.
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> Apple is incapable of having decent tethering even as they control the whole ecosystem
Are they, though? Tethering from my MacBook to my iPhone or iPad is a pretty seamless experience, to the point I don't even think about it. And sometimes I get home from a cafe and forget I'm even tethering until I notice my iPhone battery is lower than expected. And this isn't Apple, but I don't even notice I'm not on my home LAN because of tailscale.
It's definitely significantly easier than dealing with built in WWAN devices & ModemManager on my linux laptop. (Or Windows, when I used it on that same hardware.)
Do you have a link to that podcast about 5G MacBook?
>But somehow pushing the modem in the MacBook solves this...because Apple is then good at managing transient network connections in macos, hooking to complex mesh networks on protocols they don't control ?
A cell modem is mostly just another uplink, with all the hard stuff being done in the modem. The user doesn't need to do anything to use it. Tethering requires extra stuff to happen: the user has to initiate the connection, the iPhone has to reconfigure its networking, and I imagine there's a bunch of security layers that must be passed through before tethering is allowed. It's 2 entirely different scenarios.