iPadOS and macOS 26.2 Double 5GHz Wi-Fi Bandwidth for Wi-Fi 6E Devices

[falkon-engine]

160 MHz in 5 GHz means using DFS means radar hits might limit your bandwidth, and such hits will be likely if you live near an airport or military base.

 

[newdeal]

My M2 air is still at 80. My M2 Mac mini has had 160 since release I am pretty sure

 

[Howard2k]

I don't think this is new. I'm running 5GHz 160MHz on Sequoia and have been for a while on my MacBook Air M4. I don't believe my son's M2 does 160MHz though and he's running Tahoe. He seems to be limited from 80Mhz. Although maybe that M2 support is new?

M4 Air has not just been added though, it's been around for a while.

Dec 17th is when the guide was updated. We're now Jan 5th. Maybe Dec 17th they added it to Tahoe and Sequoia at that point, along with the iOS and iPadOS updates.

EDIT: Looks like an article sowing confusion based on old information 😀

M2 MacBook Air does not have 160MHz support.
M4 MacBook Air does, but it's not a Tahoe feature, you'll get it with Sequoia.

 

[cyberdogl2]

Pretty funny typo i found when looking up my model. The link in the article currently mentions “Mac Studio M4 Ultra”. I’m sure they meant M3 Ultra

 

[BGPL]

That sucks, the wifi speed on my 2021 14" MBP is terrible. Time for an upgrade with the 15" M6 Air.

 

[RadMac]

Oh. A good update.

 

[jrhop]

Correction: M2 MacBook Air still can only do 80 MHz wide channels on 5 GHz.

Thought so, M2 was never 6E

 

[svish]

Good to see the support on latest version of software. Useful addition considering 6GHz networks are not common in many parts of the world.

 

[BonAce]

I do remember that it has always been 160MHz on my MBP M3 Pro...

This is the actual bandwidth with WiFi 6 AP

 

[IceCool]

Huh. That’s interesting. You’d never notice it on my devices. IOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 slows things down in too many other little ways. Web pages hang up or freeze fairly often.

EDIT: I see that @RMMediccc has given me a “disagree” rating on this post. I am fascinated. Exactly what is it that you disagree with? I assure you that the latest OS is impacting my internet operations as I have described. If you are not experiencing similar issues, you can post and say so. But your disagreement with the facts of my post is meaningless.

People are allowed to disagree with something without explaining themselves to you. And quite honestly, there are several perfectly reasonable ways to disagree with your post that do not try to “invalid” your anecdotal experience. The reaction is “disagree” after all. Someone could use that reaction just to simply say that they personally don't have the same problems as you.

 

[drrich2]

People are allowed to disagree with something without explaining themselves to you. And quite honestly, there are several perfectly reasonable ways to disagree with your post that do not try to “invalid” your anecdotal experience.

True, they are. There are a couple of other factors that bear on this, as it's a scenario I've seen argued against before. When people click 'Disagree,' they're not just disagreeing, they are making a public declaration of it. It's natural to wonder on what basis, what is your thinking, your counter-argument, etc. And when a post makes multiple statements, positions, etc., just clicking 'Disagree' doesn't identify what was disagreed with. Subjectively, it can come off more as a low-grade snub than an effort in the spirit of civil debate. So it makes sense for the poster to then ask specifically what was disagreed with.

I'm not talking about responding to posts with one clear main assertion. If I say hamburgers taste better than hotdogs, and you click 'Disagree,' that's not ambiguous. But if you post a list of 10 talking points and I click 'Disagree,' you probably want to know with which.

 

[PkennethV]

Huh. That’s interesting. You’d never notice it on my devices. IOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 slows things down in too many other little ways. Web pages hang up or freeze fairly often.

EDIT: I see that @RMMediccc has given me a “disagree” rating on this post. I am fascinated. Exactly what is it that you disagree with? I assure you that the latest OS is impacting my internet operations as I have described. If you are not experiencing similar issues, you can post and say so. But your disagreement with the facts of my post is meaningless.

I'm not @RMMediccc but I'll share why I disagree with your comment.

160MHz channel width is not about making things snappier or more responsive. In fact, in many real life situations (i.e. with other 5GHz interference), 160MHz will almost certainly cause greater instability and latency than a 80MHz channel width.

That, however, does not mean there aren't situations where 160MHz channel width, despite the additional latency & instability wouldn't still give you "faster WiFi" speeds. Namely, with large file transfers. Web browsing performance, in almost all cases, is more dependent upon a "snappy" (low latency, "always available") type of WiFi connection, whereas large file transfers (ones that will require you to wait for multiple minutes) can stomach the higher latency and interference of 160MHz in exchange for a much thicker/wider "pipe" that can handle more data being pushed through it that can reasonably make a large file transfers go ~50% faster (theoretically it's almost 100% faster but racialistically it won't due to interreference). This particularly beneficial when doing local file sharing of media files (e.g. accessing files on a NAS within your LAN).

So a machine with buggy and slow OS/app can still do a large file transfer over a WiFi connection with 160Mhz channel width than it would be able to on a 80MHz channel width connection (even if it will web browse with more lag).

This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's kind of like the difference between snappy single core CPU speed (e.g. base M5 chip) vs an M1 Ultra with much worse single-core performance but with many more cores. So for tasks that require snappy response like web browsing, the base M5 will be significantly faster, whereas for "thicker" tasks like multi-hour renders, the M1 Ultra will beat out the base M5, all else equal.

 

[Camel993]

Thanks, I will switch it back and test it. 😊

Well, after 26.2 my Mac mini kept falling back to 2,4 GHz again even that my gear perfectly capable pushing 160 MHz, I guess it's some kind of interference