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Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

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Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#3
Interesting that Apple still uses Broadcom Wi-Fi + BT chips in most of their product range despite lots of issues with them.

Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to those.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#4
> 1. Packet captures don’t use the correct channel

I've also seen this on a 2020 Intel MacBook Air. I assumed it was a Big Sur issue but had never tried it on Catalina.

Sniffing from the command line did pick up the correct channel: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/49317/36875

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#6
post #5

Big Sur has been a significant drop in quality, even worse than Catalina. Some are bugs such as this one and some are just deliberately stupid design decisions like the changes to the notifications. I’m worried for the future of the Mac.

Early versions of Catalina were also not great. (Heck, early versions of any major macos release tend to be relatively buggy!)

I think people tend to forget things like that, and only remember the later releases of an OS since that is the version they are likely switching off of it to the newer one.

I personally have found big sir no more buggy than most releases. Better than some[1], worse than others. About middling. Not bad for it including new hardware (m1)!

[1]: ye gods, remember how bad 10.10 was with discoveryd before they rolled back to mdnsresponder! yikes!

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#7
post #3

Interesting that Apple still uses Broadcom Wi-Fi + BT chips in most of their product range despite lots of issues with them. Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to those.

Are those from Infineon->Intel->Apple modem lineage or is that a different team?

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#8
post #5

Big Sur has been a significant drop in quality, even worse than Catalina. Some are bugs such as this one and some are just deliberately stupid design decisions like the changes to the notifications. I’m worried for the future of the Mac.

As Linux laptop user, I'm bemused when the competition gets worse.

Maybe Linux on Apple Silicon will be the best of both worlds in a few years --- I think the dedicated porting effort will more than succeed and will get something more polished than Linux on Intel macs ever was.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#9
post #5

Big Sur has been a significant drop in quality, even worse than Catalina. Some are bugs such as this one and some are just deliberately stupid design decisions like the changes to the notifications. I’m worried for the future of the Mac.

Early versions of Catalina were also not great. (Heck, early versions of any major macos release tend to be relatively buggy!) I think people tend to forget things like that, and only remember the later releases of an OS since that is the version they are likely switching off of it to the newer one. I personally have found big sir no more buggy than most releases. Better than some[1], worse than others. About middlin…

I have to wonder if all issues with Apple's software quality are due to Apple redirecting resources to gracefully handling the Apple silicon transfer.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early versions of Catalina were also not great. (Heck, early versions of any major macos release tend to be relatively buggy!) I think people tend to forget things like that, and only remember the later releases of an OS since that is the version they are likely switching off of it to the newer one. I personally have found big sir no more buggy than most releases. Better than some[1], worse than others. About middlin…

I have to wonder if all issues with Apple's software quality are due to Apple redirecting resources to gracefully handling the Apple silicon transfer.

macOS quality has been declining for years. It can't all be due to the M1 transition.
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