FaceTime Video Calls Still Limited to Wi-Fi as LTE iPad Rolls Out
The Verge confirms in its testing with a review unit of the new iPad with 4G LTE that FaceTime video calling remains limited to Wi-Fi networks despite the fact that LTE offers greater bandwidth than many Wi-Fi networks.
We've just confirmed that although the new iPad has incredibly fast download and upload speeds over LTE, FaceTime video chat still won't work directly on the 4G network. As you can see in the positively vexing screenshot above, attempting to initiate a FaceTime call over LTE fails out with a message exhorting you to connect to a Wi-Fi network.
As the report notes, Steve Jobs claimed during FaceTime's introduction at the iPhone 4 media event in June 2010 that Apple still needed to work with carriers to support FaceTime over cellular data networks and that the feature would consequently remain Wi-Fi-only at least through 2010. Well into 2012 and with 3G now giving way to LTE on the new iPad, it seems that carriers are still unwilling to allow FaceTime calls to be transmitted natively over their networks, presumably due to concerns about increased data usage and strained network capacity.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
When the data was unlimited, then it made at lest some logical sense to impose this limit. But if the carriers are going to charge for usage, wouldn't it make sense for them to want us to use a lot?
With the iPad on LTE we now have a device that may have near cable internet speed on the go. And it is still handicapped by the pos carriers.
Using my iPhone to tether to my iPad for the MLB app last year I was able to only watch 3 full games per month before I hit the 4GB cap. LTE will make streaming easier and faster but it doesn't matter until we solve the carrier problem.