Why don’t MacBooks come with cellular networking? – Marco.org:
If Apple wants to offer 4G in MacBooks, they can start whenever they want. Doing it properly will just take a bit more effort than adding a modem.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than people think.
Look at what Apple had to do with iPhone 5 to support LTE globally, vs. 3G. Lots more models of the phone because of the fragmentation of the LTE network frequencies.
Translate that to the computer line, where even with Build to Order, Apple’s kept the number of models and the variations down to a minimum, and the trend has been towards fewer choices in recent models, not more.
So to support 4D in the laptops, each laptop model is going to have to be set up to support 4G in all of it’s international variants. That complicates inventory and build management, distribution and etc. Don’t forget licensing and regulatory testing and approval — and the propensity for new models to leak via that process.
And don’t forget that 4G is only recently built out well enough to support widespread adoption in the US, and it’s adoption elsewhere is still rather — spotty. It’s one thing for Sprint to come out with a 4G model that sells 200 units in the US so the bleeding edge geeks can buy it (and mostly run it on 3G networks because they don’t have 4G yet) and giggle about how Apple’s so behind the times. It’s another to sell out a hundred million 4G iPhone 5′s in 40 countries.
The combination of 3G speeds and build complexity/logistics made putting cellular into laptops fall in the “not worth it now” category. LTE changes that equation, but LTE’s only been in Apple’s product line a few months, and I expect Apple would want to prove out the networks and technology on the mobile devices before rolling it to the computers.
But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see cellular support hit OS X at the next WWDC and roll out to the computers next fall, or this time next year. I would be surprised to see it happen sooner. And I’m not at all surprised it hasn’t happened by now, given the realities of how Apple builds laptops and what I see as consumer demand for this (which is: prior to LTE, very weak).
But I’ll tell you, having recently upgraded from a first-gen iPad/WIFI to a Retina iPad/LTE, I’m sold. But I’m curious how they’re going to solve the issue of LAN vs WAN when it comes to things like devices in the home. Running both WIFI and Cellular in parallel? That’s very different than the IOS model…
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Why don’t MacBooks come with cellular networking? – Marco.org. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.