Ubiquitous wireless on your MacBook Air through your iPhone

Paul Boutin of Slate is disappointed that the MacBook Air didn’t feature a built in wireless network system. WiMax or 3G or GPRS/EDGE, anything would be usable. The iPhone may be slow out on the beach but it still works. You can get cell-based USB dongles for your laptop but they are incongruous connected to a MacBook Air or even a Macbook Pro. Mine has dislodged itself a few times in mid-file-transfer.

So how about a MacBook that gets ubiquitous wireless through the iPhone sitting in your pocket? Both have WiFi or BlueTooth. Just route the traffic through the iPhone.

There are existing phones and laptops that do this but the experience is less than ideal. An Apple-style “it just works” system is neeeded, like the Time Capsule is going to provide for Time Machine. Make any capable device work through your iPhone.

Hopefully Apple come up with this but with the iPhone SDK arriving in February we may get it from a 3rd party. I sure hope so.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Jason Madigan 10 months ago 1 point
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You can tether your iPhone for use with pretty much any wireless device relatively* easily with srelay. There's a pretty good guide for putting it all together here:

http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Teth...

Useful in an emergency. It remains to be seen as to whether Apple themselves would make this a feature - I'd imagine AT&T might have something to say about that.

*For nerds.

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Jason Madigan 10 months ago 1 point
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Actually, now that I think about it, TinyProxy from Installer.app would work just as well and should be pretty simple to setup.

http://dragonforged.com/blog/2007/09/tethering-...

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paulmwatson 10 months ago 1 point
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Thanks Jason, I'll give it a go and see how well it works.

If we can wrap that up in a "Click here to use your iPhone connection" app on Mac OS X then it would be deadly.

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paulmwatson 10 months ago 1 point
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Actually, it would be better if the setup-app was on the iPhone and then any WiFi capable computer would just see it (obviously with security and such.)

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