These days, Macs will only talk to Apple phones to get online out of the box, but you can get around the restrictions if you’re determined enough.

If you want to use a smartphone to provide internet access for a laptop, the obvious way is to create a Wi-Fi hotspot. Look at the list of Wi-Fi networks on any public transport to see how many people do this, then forget about them. This, for the sake of clarity, works fine from Android to Mac. The snag is that this is ruinous for phones’ battery life. There are better ways, but Apple doesn’t make these easy.