Wireless Connectivity on Aluminum MacBooks

[Achiever]

To those who have purchased a new, aluminum Macbook: there have been a number of complaints on the MBP forums about airport drops and wireless connectivity that were not usually experienced by plastic MB users or non-Apple laptop users whose machines were not made out of aluminum. Right or wrong, the perception has been that the design of the MBP, and perhaps its aluminum frame, made for worse wireless connectivity.

I am interested to hear from users of the new aluminum Macbooks how well their wireless works, whether they suffer frequent wireless drops where they did not before, whether they are unable to pick up a signal (or as strong a signal) in areas where they had been able to in the past, etc. I am especially intrigued to hear from folks who are upgrading from one of the plastic MBs to this version or have one of each in the same home/workplace to do a side-by-side.

 

[Yr Blues]

The Air has great connectivity. I suspect there are bugs and kinks that need to fixed now or in the first revision.

 

[Achiever]

Now that more folks may have their machines in hand and be able to test this, I thought I'd bump it.

 

[negatv1]

Well I can comment that in the same house, with the same wireless equipment (airport 'N' router), I have worse wireless reception than the white plastic macbook that my new aluminum macbook replaced.

I used to get full 802.11n speed connection over the 5ghz 802.11n connection, and now I had to actually move my wireless router, just to be able to 'see' it. Now that I can connect, it's nowhere near as good/fast of a connection (according to holding option and clicking on the airport icon in the menu bar)

Between the wireless and the sporadic clicking trackpad, I'm really be thinking about returning this machine and buying a refurb 15inch pro or Blackbook. Quite a shame because it's an awesome looking machine, and the faster graphics and memory would be missed (compared to the blackbook).

 

[Kenal0]

I have equal reception to my Blackbook. I am down one floor and about 30 feet across from my airport base station. No difference.
Kenal0

 

[theweddingdj]

wireless mbp vs mb

yeah my wireless sucks- my girlfriend has a white mb and i've got a mbp we can be sat next to each other in our kitchen and i might just about have signal and hers al be on full.
there's tons of times at home where her mb will have signal and i'll have f'all. was thinking it maybe faulty or something???

 

[mrrish]

I can attest to this. My BlackBook achieves roughly 9mbits on certain downloads, while my AlumiBook hits roughly half.

 

[mcdj]

Nuff said.

 

[flopticalcube]

Nuff said.

Internet connection speed ≠ wireless speed.

802.11n is capable of speeds upto 300Mbps (300000 kb/s in the above).

 

[iStrat]

Really? I have trouble believing the reception is that much worse....

 

[sjc83]

my speeds seems very good.

 

[iMav]

There have been several reports on the Apple support forum of people having sporadic and/or no connectivity with wireless-N networks.

Personally, I cannot connect to my wireless-N network at all. I have a dual radio router...one running G-only and one running N-only. I have to connect to the 802.11g network. My previous-gen MBP and "blackbook" connect to the N network without issue.

 

[BoingoBongo]

I can't tell the difference between this and my old whitebook.

 

[C225]

Mine is much better than my old windows laptop which was plastic. My new macbook picks up my neighbours wireless network whch i didn't know existed til i got the new laptop

 

[Minimoose 360]

So many different opinions that it's confusing.