Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when something called a “hotspot” overheats, but Verizon has issued a recall on 2.5 million mobile hotspots that may pose a fire hazard after receiving 15 reports of devices overheating.

Meanwhile, as Apple and Epic prepare to duke it out in court, Epic is building a case that Apple’s practices are anti-competitive. As part of that, a court document reveals that Apple executives have acknowledged that the key reason there’s no version of iMessage for Android devices is because Apple knows that the messaging app helps lock people into its platform.

And details about Microsoft’s next Surface Laptop have leaked, suggesting it could launch later this month and come with a choice of Intel Tiger Lake (current-gen) or AMD Renoir (previous-gen) processor options.

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Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

CM4 custom NAS complete! from r/raspberry_pi

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3 replies on “Lilbits: Apple’s iMessage lock-in strategy, Surface Laptop 4, and Verizon’s hotspot is TOO hot to handle”

  1. I am kinda surprised that they even sold 2.5 million wifi hotspots because the use case for them is hard for me to imagine.

    1. It’s businesses. Hotspots are more reliable for mobile tethering and don’t impact use of a person’s mobile phone. They are good if you have laptops for field use that go between multiple users or are going to be left in place (kiosk for a show / construction trailer / etc). Depending on the carrier you can lock what devices they’re connecting to or force traffic through a VPN tunnel.

      In most cases a device that connects with a cable would be even better but WiFi is nearly universal and works “acceptably”, so it’s become the standard.

    2. That’s expected when people are unable to think outside of their own personal use cases.

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