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Learn something new every day. I stand corrected. Although you seem to be wrong about it being available for 4 or 5 years. Apparently (in the US) it became a

Learn something new every day. I stand corrected. Although you seem to be wrong about it being available for 4 or 5 years. Apparently (in the US) it became available in February of last year for Verizon customers and a little later on the AT&T network. What sucks is that, in order to enable it, you have to pay an additional $20 to $25 per month on top of your data plan. That's just wrong. My iPhone is in WiFi nearly 100% of the time. This means that the carrier's network almost never has to deliver data to my phone save text messages and, perhaps, notifications. I'd be interesting to find out if it is actually smart enough to use WiFi for messages when available. If it does, then nearly no data goes over the cellular network. I suspect that lots of people fall into the same pattern. So, carriers charge us for something that is underutilized and then, if we want to simply use the phone as a personal hot-spot we have to pay more! Maybe I was right after all, in an odd sort of way. Granted, not an Apple issue after all. There's plenty more that could have been better with the iPhone 5. For example, why didn't they move picture and video storage to a removable mini/micro/whatever SD card and also enable this as an external file system that could also be accessed when plugged into a USB port?

masklinn 14y ago
> Although you seem to be wrong about it being available for 4 or 5 years. Apparently (in the US) it became available in February of last year for Verizon customers and a little later on the AT&T network. That's a slightly different issue: tethering has been built into iOS since 3.0 (there had been kinda-hacky HTTP thethers in 2.0 but let's ignore them), but it is indeed a service operators can lock or unlock via operator settings. > What sucks is that, in order to enable it, you have to pay an additional $20 to $25 per month on top of your data plan. I don't, for what it's worth. My carrier gives me 2GB of data per "month" (it's prepaid so I could always get a second bundle) and i can use it for wahtever I want. > For example, why didn't they move picture and video storage to a removable mini/micro/whatever SD card Because now you'd need a slot for reading a microsd card. I don't know if you've looked at the teardowns, but the only way to do that is to remove a significant chunk of battery to make room, the phone is packed to the brim. And Apple is not going to trade battery life for an SD slot few people (let alone clients) care for (let alone want).
- ANTSANTS 14y ago
  > And Apple is not going to trade battery life for an SD slot few people (let alone clients) care for (let alone want). I don't want to beat a dead horse, but iPhones lack SD/MicroSD slots because Apple wants to make more money off higher capacity models, not because users don't want them or to save space (MicroSDs and the associated hardware are astounding tiny, all these years later). 64 GiB Class 10 MicroSDs are available on Amazon for about $55. You can get an equivalent amount of storage for even less by purchasing multiple smaller capacity MicroSDs. Apple currently gets away with charging a $200 premium for only 48 extra GiB of storage in their most expensive model (64 GiB vs. 16 GiB in the standard model). Why would they want to give that premium away?

masklinn 14y ago

> Although you seem to be wrong about it being available for 4 or 5 years. Apparently (in the US) it became available in February of last year for Verizon customers and a little later on the AT&T network. That's a slightly different issue: tethering has been built into iOS since 3.0 (there had been kinda-hacky HTTP thethers in 2.0 but let's ignore them), but it is indeed a service operators can lock or unlock via operator settings. > What sucks is that, in order to enable it, you have to pay an additional $20 to $25 per month on top of your data plan. I don't, for what it's worth. My carrier gives me 2GB of data per "month" (it's prepaid so I could always get a second bundle) and i can use it for wahtever I want. > For example, why didn't they move picture and video storage to a removable mini/micro/whatever SD card Because now you'd need a slot for reading a microsd card. I don't know if you've looked at the teardowns, but the only way to do that is to remove a significant chunk of battery to make room, the phone is packed to the brim. And Apple is not going to trade battery life for an SD slot few people (let alone clients) care for (let alone want).

ANTSANTS 14y ago
> And Apple is not going to trade battery life for an SD slot few people (let alone clients) care for (let alone want). I don't want to beat a dead horse, but iPhones lack SD/MicroSD slots because Apple wants to make more money off higher capacity models, not because users don't want them or to save space (MicroSDs and the associated hardware are astounding tiny, all these years later). 64 GiB Class 10 MicroSDs are available on Amazon for about $55. You can get an equivalent amount of storage for even less by purchasing multiple smaller capacity MicroSDs. Apple currently gets away with charging a $200 premium for only 48 extra GiB of storage in their most expensive model (64 GiB vs. 16 GiB in the standard model). Why would they want to give that premium away?