We're building the radio the phone companies forgot to.
Cellular has been the most-used radio on Earth for two decades. It's still not in your Mac. That's the short version. The long version follows.
Four decades of Macintosh. Zero cellular radios.
Cellular is still bundled, locked, and brokered. Laptops with a cellular option cost hundreds more and tie you to one carrier. Hotspots tie your computer to your phone's battery. And the USB modems that do exist look like 2008 ThinkPad accessories — the best-reviewed ones hover around three stars, and "doesn't work with my Mac" is a top complaint.
The category is stagnant because the people best positioned to fix it — carriers and laptop OEMs — have no incentive to. Carriers want you inside their app. Apple sells a cellular iPad and has never, in four decades, shipped a cellular Mac. Relay isn't trying to disrupt either of them. We're just shipping the thing that should already exist.
design render
Four things we won't compromise.
Hardware should be sovereign.
Your radio shouldn't need to phone home, accept a EULA, or be paired to an account. Relay works fully offline-of-our-cloud. We never see your traffic. There is no "Relay Cloud."
The customer is the user. Not the carrier.
We sell to you. The carriers sell us bandwidth. The relationship is yours; switching is one SIM swap. If a carrier asks us to lock the device, the answer is no.
Support the hardware. For the life of the device.
Five years of firmware updates, guaranteed. Out-of-warranty repairs at cost for as long as we have parts. The thing you bought keeps working — and keeps getting better — long after we stop selling it.
Ship something a human can hold.
No betas, no digital "Founders Edition" tiers. The first units are real hardware in a real box — assembled, tested, and packed at the same workbench they were debugged on.
One workbench. One very stubborn teenager.
I'm Kavin. I'm 16, I live in Austin, and Relay exists because my MacBook is the only device I own that can't get online by itself.
This isn't a rendered concept fishing for a licensing deal. The first V1 boards exist — I've assembled them, probed them, and lived with them on my bench. When both boards powered up but refused to show up on USB, I traced the fault through the schematic myself: one pin, the modem's USB_VBUS sense line, marked no-connect. The data lines were routed perfectly. The modem simply never knew a computer had arrived. Diagnosed at the netlist, documented, posted, fixed in the next board spin.
I build in public. Bring-up logs, schematic decisions, certification progress — mistakes included. What's measured on this site is measured; what's a target says target. If a date slips, you'll read it from me before you read it anywhere else.
Relay is made by Sovereign ATX LLC. The person who packs your box is the person who wrote this page. Email kavin@relay5g.com — a human replies. Me.
— Kavin
Not a metaphor.
assembled and probed.
USB_VBUS, no-connect. Found it.
What's ahead.
One story, told the same way everywhere: the first batch ships Q2–Q3 2027, and every step between here and there is gated on certification.
bring-up → next spin.
first V1 boards assembled and on the bench. the USB_VBUS fix lands in the next board revision. antenna numbers stay labeled "design target" until they've been in a chamber.
engineering validation.
real Macs, real SIMs, real measurements — published when they exist, good or bad.
certification.
FCC, CE, IC, PTCRB — targeted for 2027, ahead of shipping. nothing ships before relay's own FCC grant. not one unit.
first batch ships.
reservations honored in order. you'll hear about every milestone before you hear about a tracking number.
Help us put the radio back inside the computer.
Reserve a unit. Free — no payment today, no card on file.
Reservation only · No charge until shipping · FCC authorization in progress · Ships Q2–Q3 2027