There are serious productivity gains to be had from hotspotting
Qualcomm’s recent announcement of the Snapdragon X2 Elite shows that the company continues to strengthen its push to gain a foothold in Windows PCs., particularly as Nvidia pumps investment into a reeling Intel.
The X2 Elite outperforms Qualcomm’s previous PC offerings in all the important key metrics. But there’s one feature from the company’s early days that hasn’t made a return: the integrated cellular connectivity that came standard before the company switched to its current Oryon CPU cores.
That’s not surprising. Cellular connectivity has never been a popular option in consumer PCs often used in Wi-Fi environments like homes and schools.
For Apple, for example, 5G has been one of those few remaining lines in the sand between the Mac, which has never supported integrated cellular, and the iPad – aided by its iPhone bloodline – has offered a cellular option since the first model. And with iPadOS 26’s support for windows and a menu bar, the iPad experience is closer to the Mac’s than ever.
Options for getting PCs on these networks extend back to the early 1990s and heated up when 3G became fast enough for email and the web (barely). At a time when carriers, seeing their networks straining from the unprecedented load of smartphones, refused to support tethering or smartphone hotspots, the MiFi device from Novatel Wireless (now Inseego) allowed multiple computers to access the wireless internet via an ad hoc Wi-Fi network.
