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."

Didn't he say this..

[zoid.com]

I'm pretty sure he said this two days ago. Yep... here it is:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361029,00.asp [pcmag.com]

2 days ago...

I used to come here to get the lates tech news.

Re:Forged Headers?

[phantomfive]

Yeah, but why? It's not like anyone would be offended if he had a secretary answer his emails, there is no reason to forge them. And if he did sign it with a cert, he could have just as easily given the cert to the secretary.

Re:yet another bad iPad-related choice...

[ducomputergeek]

I'm not so sure, because this is exactly the type of device we've been looking for to give to our sales reps. We have a web-app product we like to demo to people. Potential customers usually don't like playing with the app when it's on a sales rep laptop or netbook. Many of the people I think have a fear of using somebody elses computer and they'll "screw something up". Plus it costs us $60 per month per sales rep for the wireless cards. We tried using iPod Touches/iPhones for demos, but the screens are too small.

These devices seem to be perfect. Its a lot easier and I'm going to say less intimidating for reps to carry into demos, especially initial calls, and $30 per month is cheaper than $60 per month.

People often have a fear of computers. We noticed that when we handed over an iPod Touch with the demo, people were more willing to pick it up and play around with it. It was perfect for demoing the Mobile version of the application, but horrible to show the full browser version.

I think it will play well out in the general market. You just have to realize that the general market is not the slashdot crowd.

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[jmactacular]

I recently tried changing my IP from auto assigned to a static ip on my win 7 box, and after it rebooted, it said it needed me to activate windows. What doofus would make your network settings tied to windows activation? Or anything that might change after you've already activated it?

Re:This is why I'll never own anything apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. I actually dropped my Cable connection and have been exclusively tethering via my Droid for the last 2 months!

Re:It's getting ridiculous

[nategasser]

You use electricity in your vacuum cleaner, your blender, and your hair dryer, and you pay for each, even though you don't use them at the same time. Nobody complains about that.

The difference is the unlimited plans. If consumers would consent to paying straight metered rates for bandwidth, like we do for electricity and gas/oil, we could be free of all these stupid packages and deals and calling circles and contracts.

Cell phone service and broadband internet are commodity utilities, yet they're marketed as "lifestyle" services -- which means, expensive advertising that appeals to emotions.

I hope that, before every device in our lives gets connected, that bandwidth becomes as boring and predictable as electricity or heating oil.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[kimvette]

and yet, some other providers manage to provide unlimited voice and data for less.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[LBArrettAnderson]

By all means, start a petition. I just hope you realize that in order to make the same amount of money, carriers would charge less for the limited plans, but more for the unlimited plans. And since people will be tethering, they will have to make even more money in order to pay for the increased amount of bandwidth that would occur.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[mikael_j]

Well, my experience from using Symbian smartphones is that it doesn't work great with other phones. My problems included constant memory leaks (both from 3rd party apps and apps that came with the phones), CPU hogging while running in the background, apps never shutting down (even when told to) and instead just living on as 5% CPU and RAM-stealing zombies, most of the time on my last Nokia phone I would get about 60-80 hours before it would lock up so badly due to low memory that it wouldn't even allow me to answer incoming calls(!) and I'd be forced to "reboot" it by removing the battery. If this was the only Symbian phone I'd owned I would've been inclined to assume it was a problem with that specific phone, but I've had these problems on two Symbian phones of my own and I've also seen this happen on phones belonging to friends of mine.

/Mikael

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet I have never had any of these issues with my S60 phone, or any of the S60 phones I have owned

Re:When they came for the iPhone users

[MoralHazard]

I just spent the last three hours debugging and fixing Xorg on my Intel Q35 onboard graphics adapter, under the Fedora 12 Linux distro. My eyes are bleary, and I have to be at work in five hours, but I actually feel pretty good. I read your comment and started smirking like a jackass.

Short version: Xorg and the kernel have completely fux0rd the current (2.9-ish) Intel GPU support. For some reason, Fedora shipped this pile of steaming crap with F12, and so many people with fast, stable, accelerated graphics (beautiful Compiz!) under F10 and F11 have found themselves sorely disappointed by F12. I was one of those people, this weekend, when I finally got around to upgrading to F12.

But I feel good, not shitty. My problem is solved: I have Compiz working fine and fast at full res. I spent some quality time with Google, and I re-learned how to use 'xrandr' and 'xorg.conf', and I hard-coded all the modelines I need (which the X driver can't seem to figure out, on its own), and there you go.

Yeah, I'm a smug bastard. And any Fedora release certainly ships with more bugs than any OSX release. But dammit, it's nice to be able to fix stuff when it breaks, instead of staring mutely like an ape at some smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable $700 white plastic brick.

Much as I want to strangle certain members of FESCo right now, I still wouldn't trade my F12 install DVD for anything else. (Except maybe F11. Those fuckers.)

Re:You get what you pay for?

[t0p]

Indeed. I don't have landline connection to my home, so I use a Sony Ericsson K800i 3G dumb-phone to connect my computers to the net. I just got a bluetooth dongle so I don't need to use the USB datacable anymore (it was a real pain: my phone gets a reliable 3G signal only by the living-room window, so I had to arrange the room to suit. But no more). "Tethering" is a simple function that even my ancient nokia 3220 (vintage circa 2002?) could handle. Then I read posts by excited iPhone users describing the various hoops they have to jump through to do the same with their wondrous gadget. Puh-leeeze!! Incidentally, I've got my phone on a "pay as you go" basis, which gives a week's "unlimited mobile internet use" for a couple of pounds. According to the small print, this is meant to be just internet use by the phone - web browsing with the phone's browser, email via the built-in email client and so on. Use of phone "as modem" is specifically forbidden. Yet I've been engaging in this forbidden behaviour for several years now, often downloading up to a GB of data in a day. I was more cautious in the beginning, fearing that large data transfer would set off the alarms. But I'm now pretty confident that my service provider *can't* easily differentiate between the different types of usage. I've heard that Vodafone UK is more on the ball in this respect. But my provider is either lazy or dumb, or maybe both. Though you'll note I haven't named them here, I don't want to tempt fickle fate too much!

Re:You get what you pay for?

[delinear]

The process needs to be simple and automatic to fit in with Apple's idea of what these devices should be like. Pairing 2 devices isn't (yet) and so they don't do it (yet.)

The process should be incredibly simple when you make the hardware and the software for both devices. It would be trivial to have a single push-button activation on one device which scans for local devices and triggers an acceptance prompt on the other device - bam, single step pairing. If they're not allowing this then it's not for reasons of UI complexity.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[StayFrosty]

The NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers have been easily installed in Ubuntu by a program called jockey since the 7.x releases. It's under System --> Administration --> Hardware drivers. It can be launched from the CLI if you so choose with either jockey-gtk or jockey-text. Installing NVIDIA or ATI drivers is as simple as clicking on the driver and clicking "install." When there is a kernel update, DKMS automatically recompiles the driver for the new kernel so there is no screwing around with that any more either.