Downloader: Steve Jobs on iPad tethering with iPhone: "No."

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Steve Jobs on iPad tethering with iPhone: "No."

It goes almost without saying that a lot of the people who buy Apple's new iPad will already have Apple's iPhone. Maybe you were thinking, "Well, since I've got an iPhone already, why pay for two data plans? There has to be some way to tether the iPad using the iPhone, right?"

According to Steve Jobs, the answer is a big, fat NO.

Jobs responded to an email from Swedish DJ Jezper Söderlund, who asked:

Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

Two devices, based on the same OS, with already built-in technology to share one data plan suggests a secondary contract could possibly be redundant.

From the look of your keynote, where the iPad sits well between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I was hoping the three of them could interact as seamless as possible.

And his answer was just one word. No. (Sent from his iPhone, of course.)

We'll have to wait and see whether intrepid iPhone hackers will be able to change that answer when it comes to jailbroken phones, but Jobs seems set on the model of a separate data plan for each device.

[via Engadget]