New MBP has SLOWER Wifi than last year's MB Air

[oneMadRssn]

I think I read a post on reddit from someone that alleged to be a wi-fi geek. I can't find it now...

EDIT:
Found the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comm...cbook_pro_is/d9ii6l9/?st=iv2pwc0d&sh=0ff07b50

It's much easier to synthetically show a small improvement from 2x2 to 3x3 in a controlled environment with 1 AP and 1 client compared to real world gains. The kind of spatial diversity needed to support a 3rd spatial stream requires at least a good half foot of separation per antenna if not polarization diversity to truly get the benefits. Quite frankly in most cases three antennas are just thoughtlessly slapped on with no consideration for truly taking advantage of the diversity it offers.

Also: a 3rd spatial stream takes 33% more power to support for maybe a 15% real world benefit at most.

EDIT: it's also worth mentioning that 3-stream MIMO rates require a much higher SNR compared to 1 stream SISO or 2 stream MIMO, and most of the times when a user complains about slow wifi, they aren't sitting 8 feet from their AP and 2x2 vs 3x3 hardware isn't even a factor!

Further, 802.11ac standards based beamformjng uses phased pairs of AP radios to target a client via constructive interference. So a 4x4 AP can create a 2x2 beam formed pair or a 3x3 non-beamformed signal. I've found that testing against high end 4x4 enterprise AP's, they most often will choose 2x2 BF rates even on 3x3 hardware.

Long story short, the old 3-antenna setup was not actually better than this new 2-antenna setup.

 

[therealseebs]

Long story short, the thing that actually got better performance was not actually better, because it would only be significantly better some of the time, and the rest of the time it wouldn't be as much better, or might not even be better.

By the same reasoning, if we look at the wifi performance of a macbook with the 3-antenna setup that's been shot, reduced to slag with thermite, and encased in concrete, and compare it to the performance of a macbook with no antennas at all subject to the same conditions, we find that the 3-antenna setup is not "actually better" than not having any antennae at all.

Good to know!

But back in normal reality, "works better some of the time, and never works worse" is "actually better".

 

[unagimiyagi]

The most obvious reason I can think of for this slower chip is that someone wanted to cut costs. Every few cents saved adds up. It's what Apple is famous for as supply chain is an offensive weapon for them.

Given that wifi speeds and chips invariably increase over time while decreasing in price, there's really no other explanation for the slower speeds this year.

If Apple sourced a slow wifi chip because a faster one that they had already sold for a year wasn't compatible with the new tech that they crammed inside the new macbook pro, then they are either cheapskates or not very smart engineers. I seriously doubt that a new wifi chip would consume more battery. I also doubt the old chip is alot smaller / thinner than the new chip. The faster chip was already being used in a production machine a year ago without any problems.

From a technical standpoint it very well may not matter right now, but it makes them look really bad--either incompetent or greedy. I don't see how Apple comes away without any loss of face on this issue.

Apple also took out the optical out from the headphone jack. Why would you do that? That part is already a solved problem and doesn't take up extra space. You had it incorporated just fine before. The new mbp isn't much smaller nor thinner. It's a cheap part. Why on earth would you take this out? It's just overthinking and needless simplicity. Did users complain about having to pay for an optical out that they rarely use? Is that why you cut it out, to save costs? Uh, no. You raised the price by $500.

I will say this: Apple makes weird decisions. Apparently just for the sake of being weird.

Folks, the macbook PRO, as in professional, is dead. It's a done deal. They're going to merge mac os x with the iPad pro. They keep thinking the major market for them is tablets and iphones. They're not a real computer company anymore. They are going where the money is, so it's their choice. BUT stop denying it.

 

[5iMacs]

Given that wifi speeds and chips invariably increase over time while decreasing in price, there's really no other explanation for the slower speeds this year.
.

Maybe they just wanted favor more range over greater speed. These tradeoffs are very complex when you are dealing with antennas and radios.

As I reviewed on Tuesday, far from my 1300MHz router in the range where speed ends up around 100Mbps, the new non-touch-bar MacBook Pro was close to 20% faster than the 2015 MBP 15"

 

[oneMadRssn]

Long story short, the thing that actually got better performance was not actually better, because it would only be significantly better some of the time, and the rest of the time it wouldn't be as much better, or might not even be better.

By the same reasoning, if we look at the wifi performance of a macbook with the 3-antenna setup that's been shot, reduced to slag with thermite, and encased in concrete, and compare it to the performance of a macbook with no antennas at all subject to the same conditions, we find that the 3-antenna setup is not "actually better" than not having any antennae at all.

Good to know!

But back in normal reality, "works better some of the time, and never works worse" is "actually better".

What? It's an engineering decision. People who aren't dummies weighed the pros and cons. But of course forum trolls know better than the best wireless engineers working for the most prestigious consumer electronics company.

3 easy to understand points: (1) most newer routers forced a 2x2 setup anyway, as it is better for the whole network; (2) the antennas need to be placed at least 6 inches apart from eachother, easy to do with 2, hard to do with 3 in a laptop; (3) 3x3 is less power efficient.

I don't blame them for making this change.

 

[Griggi]

[...]
Losing performance on Wi-Fi is definitely a problem for some users. However, those users are probably less likely to be using the base model 13" MacBook Pro. I'm sure Apple figures, anyone doing content creation and working with lots of data stored on a network, are going to at LEAST be using the Touchbar 13" model with it's faster CPU, et al; and more than likely, the 15" model. Now I'm not justifying this at all. There's never a good reason for less performance. Just saying that I can't imagine many users at all 'noticing' the difference, and those that would, probably won't own this model.

The 13" Base model has become the "Macbook Air", heck, Phil Schiller even said so. I'm curious of the 13" TouchBar model will include the faster wi-fi.

Hi there,

I think it is unpleasent that the 13" non-touchbar MacBook Pro only uses 2x2 MiMo because I'd rather choose the base MBP without touchbar because it has a larger battery.

However as it seems the MacBook Pro with touchbar does indeed have 3x3 MiMo, i.e. the same performance as the old MacBook Pros from 2015... at least Apple shows three antenna connectors on the 13" model with touchbar instead of just two connectors on the non-touchbar version:




I've just pulled that image from Apples homepage.

Kind regards

 

[BarracksSi]

i dont live in a F-cage, and my router is not using 100% for antenna at the moment.. this is what i get with mbpr (2014)

View attachment 670092

And definitely i dont want go slower... i move large files via wifi and want having a stable and fast connection.

they should go faster and having mu-mimo support rather than cutting the speed.



i do.

I'm a little confused here -- your screenshot shows Mbps, but they're talking about Gbps.

 

[Howard2k]

I'm a little confused here -- your screenshot shows Mbps, but they're talking about Gbps.

1,175Mb/s = 1.175Gb/s.
It's certainly not 1,175Gb/s!

 

[BarracksSi]

1,175Mb/s = 1.175Gb/s.
It's certainly not 1,175Gb/s!

:facepalm: Oh duh, I forgot to move the decimal....

You know how they say discussion forums are like a coffee shop where everybody's talking at once? I'm that guy who walks into the middle of a conversation...

 

[dyn]

The speed of Wireless AC isn't about being able to saturate a super fast 10Gb fiber connection or something folks. It's about file transfers.

Yeah and wireless sucks for things like that as it is far too unreliable. The speed will go all over the place (but you won't see that). Wired networking is far better suited for filetransfers as they are reliable and also faster.

This is a wireless technology using the 5GHz network. It is prone to regulation from the local government. In the USA you have different channels available than in say the EU or in Japan. The amount of channels determine how much speed you can get. If there are only 4 then your speed is very limited. Another thing is the bandwidth which can be 20, 40 or 80MHz. The actual speed highly depends on the settings, the environment (noise as well as materials for doors, walls) and the used hardware (both AP and client). Picking the wrong settings can really harm the wifi connection.

Quite often all these issues are due to cheap hardware, their settings as well as noise. Most people don't have a very sophisticated network, they just use the wifi on their broadband modem/router or buy some cheap AP.

Even if Apple would have included the fastest 802.11ac chip they could find, that still doesn't mean you are actually going to get everything out of it. There are far too many things that influence this and quite a lot you can't control. After all, it is a wireless technology. With wifi it is not uncommon that at the utmost you'll be getting 75% of the advertised speed. Most of the speeds will be far below 867Mbps. So basically it is the other way around: Apple isn't screwing the new MBP owners, it is screwing the Air owners because they included something that those users are never able to get, yet they paid for it.

 

[mrex]

people who are looking for the speed, know exactly how to build their network (e.g. wired). but lets imagine: if you change the word wireless to ethernet, your message is still the same. there are always people who have crappy networks, buy crappy cheap hardware, they do not know how to connect those devices and change settings to get the maximum speed, but does it mean that others have to live with it and make compromises because "there are always people like that"...