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Jobs Says No Tethering iPad To iPhone
tugfoigel writes "Anyone who currently owns an iPhone and was hoping they would be able to use it as a mobile Web access point for a Wi-Fi iPad just got some bad news. Reportedly, Steve Jobs has said this will not happen. Swedish blog Slashat.se claims they e-mailed Jobs directly to ask him whether or not you'd be able to tether your iPad and iPhone and received a terse 'No' in reply. According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone."
Why did anybody think that they'd allow users to tether the iPad to anything when it's 3G data plan only costs $30 a month? With its limited OS, you can only run official apps that can't have high-bandwidth uses (like streaming video) on 3G. That's the reason you get such a discount compared to a $60 a month 5 GB plan...
If you want to tether a computer and have iPad and iPhone and let them think they're on WiFi, you want a $60 a month plan and a MiFi device from either Verizon or Sprint.
In all seriousness, I'm proud to live in a Microsoft and Apple-free household.
Maybe someday when they realize how harmful DRM really is I'll take another look.
Nonsense like this isn't convincing me I'm wrong.
Bye.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Personally I'd like to know how he thinks he's going to stop it. Nothing like telling someone 'no' to challenge them.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Steve's deathgrip on what I can and can't do with _my_ device... Why would anyone subject themselves to that?
Sent from my PDP-11
Oh, and BTW: I bet it will tether to my G1.
Zoid.com
I'm expected to pay the service provider 30$ for home Internet, 30$ for phone and now 30$ for tablet?! Very soon our cars will be connected devices and not long after that glasses, watches, etc. Are we supposed to keep paying up per device? It's highly unreasonable, specially since most people don't use two devices at the same time.
This is Slashdot, wake up people.
How hard is it to forge headers, it's not like his email was signed with a cert?
Maybe I should send a story in with fake headers and see if it gets posted...
I guess it depends on the size of the rock you choose to crack it.
At the risk of being moderated "Troll"...
What a jerk.
It's a shame that in the 21st century you buy a device like that and then you have to ask permission to the company that made it for doing something obvious. The iPad can do that, but they prevent you from doing it via software, just because if you want to do something like that, they want you to spend even more money on another of their devices. So actually they don't make money on what they give you, but on what they take away from you. The EU has much more articulated antitrust laws than US (see MS Windows browser case), let's hope they'll do something, sooner or later. BTW, I'm a Linux and GNU and FLOSS supporter, so from my point of view Microsoft is nothing more than a company that tries to do its business, but before MS came along all kinds of computers where closed like Apples. Microsoft opened up the market and spurred strong competition between hardware producers so that now we have better tecnology at lower prices, now with Apple we can see again what the closed world was like. Will the apple hype ever deflate in front of such things?
According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone.
Perhaps his reply gave it away:
No.
Sent from my iPhone
A couple other people have pointed out niche business uses for the iPad. The general market may not be the /. crowd, but it's not your niche, either.
And if the iPad browser doesn't support your web app just the way you want it you can't install a browser that does. Which kinda sucks. Apple's control over the device, to me, makes it poorly suited to any business use.
Am I the only one who thinks that this paticular Apple product is going the way of Newtons [wikipedia.org]?
If you mean a product that launches a whole new paradigm of computing devices, then yes.
Ah, yes, the good old days. News flash -- they're GONE. .. apparently even the dumb ones run an OS and have ARM11 CPUs and internet and JAVA). Or if you "tether". Then you're treated as a prime mark for extortion and they'll try to charge you $30, $40, $60, $+++ / month just to use your existing service with the sim in or connection to one of those devices.
Now even the USA's crappy GSM carriers are trying to control which GSM devices
you can use your GSM service plan with by creating some artificial 'incompatibility' (i.e. bullshit deceptive marketing assertion) between their
plan X and device Y. If you have a shiny enough GSM device, or even just anything
that ISN'T purchased through your carrier directly in association with your specific service plan, expect them to either block your data service or forcibly
switch you to a "compatible" (read: two to four times the cost for the same technical service) data plan. You're screwed if you try to use a netbook, laptop, USB GSM modem, PCMCIA / Expresscard data modem, "smartphone" (whatever that is these days
IMHO that seems to violate the Carterphone regulatory precedents, as well as the USA's anti-trust "tying" laws about trying to sell X service plan only with X carrier branded / approved model devices, even if other brand devices are FCC approved for use with that carrier in the USA, i.e. there's no technical or regulatory / legal incompatibility causing them reason to deny or restrict service.
Lawyer, anyone???
Tmobile even has an "android data plan". Yes, who'd have guessed it. If you happen to be running an open source OS on your phone, you get to pay 3x the amount you'd pay for THE EXACT SAME SERVICE if your phone ran Symbian. Sounds a lot like anti-competitive / unfair discrimination to me.
It would be the same as having your ISP try to charge you 4x the prices if you have a Mac, and 6x the prices if you run LINUX as if your PC has the ISP branded version of Windows XP installed. Why would we STAND for this in this day and age DECADES after this kind of anti-trust BS got AT&T broken up, carterphone, etc.???
Logic ? Don't bother, it's the daily Two Minutes Apple Hate.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
almost all WinMob and Android phones can do wifi -> 3g routing, so your iPad will be able to tether without even realizing it's tethering. Bluetooth -> 3G and Bluetooth -> Wifi would prolly not work, though, if the iPad's BT stack is anything like the iPhone's.
I'd be leery of buying from a company with such a customer unfriendly attitude though. Their goal is clearly to sell more 3G upgrades, on which they take 90% margin.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
My general experience is that if you stick to the specs, web-apps work pretty well the same way in Safari, FF, Opera, and Chrome. Until Apple turns Webkit into IE, then it's time to look at other platforms. But as I said in the OP, the full browser app renders perfectly on the iPhone/Touch but the screen is too small to make an effective demo.
But Apple's control makes it relatively easy to work with in a small shop. Why? We know exactly what the rules are and have a much smaller number of variations to do QA against. If it works on one iPad, it's going to work on them all. It makes it easy to offer our clients a written guarantee of "This will work with the X version of the iWhatever". To contrast that to Android, we're currently charging clients double the amount for the same guarantee because with Android we have to spend a lot more money on acquiring hardware and QA testing.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
We are using the electrons on whatever we want. With the ISP we're not allowed to use the bits on whatever we want. THAT is why we don't complain on the former (if we weren't allowed to use a gang socket you'd hear us complain) but we do on the latter.
After all, a router cannot push more packets out at one time than the connection maxes out at. We can't use the same data packet for multiple computers.
With ISPs the packet is like the electrons of our electrical system.
And we're not told we can't use multiple devices on our electrical service but we ARE told we can't use multiple devices on our internet service.