Jobs says iPad won’t allow iPhone tethering

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In his emails to Apple customers who take the time to write him and ask him questions, Steve Jobs usually comes across as a really busy guy who, despite his workload, is really trying his best to maintain a human, one-on-one connection to his customers.

On some other occasions, though, Jobs will occasionally comes across as a devastating master of pith, capable of infusing a few matter-of-fact words with a palpably scornful undercurrent, as if — if he wasn’t just so darn busy all the time — he might instead muse for a few hundred words on just what it must be like to be as stupid as the quivering, moronic biomass to which he must deign to pander… and of which his correspondent is just one molecularly small part.

Whether the specific email from Jobs that is the subject of this post comes across as the former type of Jobsian communiqué or the latter is up to you. Either way, it contains at least one new bit of information about the iPad: you won’t be able to tether it to your iPhone.

This is the email that Swedish DJ wrote to Steve Jobs:

I’ll keep it short.

I’m Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, currently about to replace the very last computer at home with a brand spanking new iMac i7. I’m also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question:

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.

All the best,
Jezper Söderlund

And Jobs’ response:

No.

Sent from my iPhone

Okay, but why not? The iPhone 3Gs officially supports tethering outside of the United States, including Sweden, and presumably it should be a simple thing to pair an iPad to an iPhone 3Gs through Bluetooth. One of the big reasons Apple and AT&T went with a month-by-month, contract-free 3G option for the iPad was because both companies stated they didn’t think most customers would be willing to sign up for another data contract. An arbitrary decision not to allow international iPhone 3Gs’ to pair with iPads over Bluetooth seems to flatly contradict the spirit of that decision… although it’s worth noting that we have no idea what the 3G schemes for the iPad will look like internationally. They may very well be far more prohibitive than the privileged U.S. offering.

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