Comment by jillesvangurp

20 hours ago

It's part of it. Another part of the reason is patent related royalties that they have to pay to the likes of Qualcomm, Nokia, etc. for any device that has a working 5G stack inside of it. Apple actually has had their own 5G modem implementation for a few years now; they clearly have the technology to deliver this with a clean full in house chip design.

But any device that has that embedded would have some royalty overhead added to the BOM. Which is why they've always had ipads with and without 5G and have so far never really bothered with adding this on laptops (which actually would make a lot of sense from a technical point of view). Operators would probably love that because it's a nice up-sell opportunity on monthly subscriptions. And with soft sims there would not be a need for a hardware sim card.

For the same reason, you don't see this feature on many other laptops either. There are a few obviously but it's a less common feature than you'd expect given how important good connectivity is to most laptop users.

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jillesvangurp

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dylan604  20 hours ago

So the reason they have not released a +cellular MBP is down to them not wanting to make royalty payments? What do they care? They just roll that payment into the +cellular price bump. It's not like they are dipping into their own billion dollar cash on hand balance.

  • jillesvangurp  19 hours ago

    Do you have a better reason? I think the price difference is probably too high to justify the feature. I don't see any technical reason why they wouldn't do this. But patent royalties and additional overhead related to device certification would definitely add some complexity and cost.

    • dylan604  19 hours ago

      No, but there's a lot of examples of "I don't have a better reason" regarding Apple decisions. I know that there's a lot of bad blood between Apple and Nvidia hence AMD GPUs every where before the M-series chips. Clearly, they are tired of of their cellular vendors, otherwise they would not have developed their own chips. But they already have the cellular relation for the iPhone/iPads, so what would extending that to allow MBP inclusion mean that makes it a non-starter for Apple?

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  • enos_feedler  18 hours ago

    Is it possible its related to data traffic with carriers?

    • judge2020  9 hours ago

      I would say this is the main reason, given tethering has caps, but maybe also how cell tower capacity probably would not do great with a whole new product market segment that's also high-bandwidth during the LTE days. With 5G's promise of increased capacity and 6G on the way, maybe it'll be possible soon enough.