<story><title>Apple plans to equip MacBooks with in-house cellular modems</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/20/macbook-integrated-cellular-modem-2028/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>poisonborz</author><text>Why? I had it as well and never used it. Smartphones have much better reception, it&amp;#x27;s always there, press of a button to share the connection. When no smartphone, a tiny sim modem costs peanuts. You also need a separate data plan, for many carriers not so obvious or not really worth. I don&amp;#x27;t get sim trays in laptops.</text></item><item><author>thot_experiment</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve had a laptop with a cellular modem for almost 4 years now and there&amp;#x27;s zero chance I&amp;#x27;m ever going back to a laptop without one. Maybe framework next time around, if my laptop had some GPIOs too!? Heaven.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zamadatix</author><text>Others are rightly pointing out &amp;quot;laptops are bigger so should have better reception&amp;quot; (assuming it&amp;#x27;s physically taking advantage of that, which most built-in do) but the modems in most laptops have been historically bad with the modems in phones top of the line (as well as often refreshed more often).&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s of course not a requirement, Apple could choose to put in the greatest modem they can make. That combined with good antenna design in the MacBooks should lead to significantly better reception. The limit of this is how good the modem is. Given how long they&amp;#x27;ve let it slip my guess is they won&amp;#x27;t release it until it&amp;#x27;s very competitive, similar to how long they took to dump Intel despite the iPhone processors being competitive with the likes of the Intel m3 well before that. Time will tell on that one.&lt;p&gt;The other half of the story is Apple has already ditched SIMs for eSIMs in the iPhone. It&amp;#x27;d be extremely odd if they then went backwards on this to put a SIM tray in the MacBook, a device they are regularly reluctant to include more than a couple of connectors on in the first place.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple plans to equip MacBooks with in-house cellular modems</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/20/macbook-integrated-cellular-modem-2028/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>poisonborz</author><text>Why? I had it as well and never used it. Smartphones have much better reception, it&amp;#x27;s always there, press of a button to share the connection. When no smartphone, a tiny sim modem costs peanuts. You also need a separate data plan, for many carriers not so obvious or not really worth. I don&amp;#x27;t get sim trays in laptops.</text></item><item><author>thot_experiment</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve had a laptop with a cellular modem for almost 4 years now and there&amp;#x27;s zero chance I&amp;#x27;m ever going back to a laptop without one. Maybe framework next time around, if my laptop had some GPIOs too!? Heaven.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kubik369</author><text>Must have been a problem with the particular laptop&amp;#x2F;country you are in. Traditionally, laptops have much more robust cellular than phones.&lt;p&gt;You say the press of a button, but having cellular in the laptop is zero interactions, which is great for casual users.</text></comment>