It's part of it. Another part of the reason is patent related royalties that they have to pay to the likes of Qualcomm, Nokia, etc. for any device that has a working 5G stack inside of it. Apple actually has had their own 5G modem implementation for a few years now; they clearly have the technology to deliver this with a clean full in house chip design.

But any device that has that embedded would have some royalty overhead added to the BOM. Which is why they've always had ipads with and without 5G and have so far never really bothered with adding this on laptops (which actually would make a lot of sense from a technical point of view). Operators would probably love that because it's a nice up-sell opportunity on monthly subscriptions. And with soft sims there would not be a need for a hardware sim card.

For the same reason, you don't see this feature on many other laptops either. There are a few obviously but it's a less common feature than you'd expect given how important good connectivity is to most laptop users.

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dylan604 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So the reason they have not released a +cellular MBP is down to them not wanting to make royalty payments? What do they care? They just roll that payment into the +cellular price bump. It's not like they are dipping into their own billion dollar cash on hand balance.

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jillesvangurp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you have a better reason? I think the price difference is probably too high to justify the feature. I don't see any technical reason why they wouldn't do this. But patent royalties and additional overhead related to device certification would definitely add some complexity and cost.

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dylan604 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, but there's a lot of examples of "I don't have a better reason" regarding Apple decisions. I know that there's a lot of bad blood between Apple and Nvidia hence AMD GPUs every where before the M-series chips. Clearly, they are tired of of their cellular vendors, otherwise they would not have developed their own chips. But they already have the cellular relation for the iPhone/iPads, so what would extending that to allow MBP inclusion mean that makes it a non-starter for Apple?

	▲	jillesvangurp 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I can only speculate. But my guess is that they don't anticipate additional mac sales if they were to ship this feature. So, the only reason to do this for them would be if it would bring in more revenue. And given the cost overhead related to patents that I outlined, it might just not be that interesting. My guess is that a lot of the agreements they have for this might cover iphones and ipads but not laptops. It's not just Apple. 5G stacks in laptop are just very uncommon. Most vendors seem to independently come to the conclusion that they are better off not bundling that. Of course the difference is that Apple now has their own modems and chips for this. Which might change things but so far hasn't. The reasons Apple want to vertically integrate everything and own it are easier to grasp: chips, firmware and software made by them are easier to control and upgrade by them. With qualcomm, they are basically getting them, their development teams, their supply chains for chips on the critical path to shipping products. And they are outsourcing what is a pretty major part of the whole phone experience to a third party. Apple has been working on their own 5G modem for many years before they shipped it. I don't know for sure but I would not be surprised if efforts for that started when Steve Jobs was still alive even. This was always the logical move for them to make as soon as they got the idea of doing their own chipsets for their phones.

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enos_feedler an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it possible its related to data traffic with carriers?

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kotaKat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm partially wondering if we're going to see a cellular Macbook this week on a C1/C2-derivitive modem for 'mobile computer' use.

The C3 modem is just around the corner though, as is the satellite network Globalstar's been building behind the scenes for it.

https://investors.globalstar.com/news-releases/news-release-...

It's now live and on-air for testing...