Instant Hotspot
Paying your cell carrier another $20 or so every month entitles you to use the iPhone’s Personal Hotspot feature. That’s where the phone itself acts as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, so that your laptop (or any other gadgets) can get online almost anywhere.
It used to be kind of a pain to get going. Each time you wanted your laptop to get online, you had to wake your iPhone, unlock it, open Settings, and turn on Personal Hotspot. Then you had to wait about 20 seconds, until the phone’s name showed up in your 
menu.
Not anymore.
Now the phone can stay in your pocket. Its name appears in your menu, ready for choosing at any time—even if the phone is asleep and locked, and even if Personal Hotspot is turned off! Handily enough, the menu also shows the phone’s battery and signal status (Figure 9-5).
Figure 9-5. Once your Mac is online through your iPhone’s cellular connection, it tries to save you money by suspending data-intensive jobs like full backups and software updates. And it closes down the connection when you no longer need it, to save your iPhone’s battery.
As usual, this ...
Get macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
