Leopard = meh
Snow Leopard = Awesome
Lion = meh
Yosemite = ok
Sierra = good
High Sierra = Awesome
Mojave = meh
Catalina = meh
Big Sur = meh
(snow leopard and high sierra were the best IMO)
Mac Admin for 15 years
Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
61–70 of 166 posts
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#62Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#63Interesting 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.
What are the issue with Broadcom chips?
One year ago:
Broadcom bluetooth/wifi chips ran out of firmware hot patch ram slots long time ago. Company seems to be too cheap to respin the rom mask with all the fixes baked in. From what I remember even brand new iphone x ships with no room for BT firmware patching.
RECON 2019 - Reversing and Exploiting Broadcom Bluetooth (Jiska Classen, Dennis Mantz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Mi8_9ABCc
35C3 - Dissecting Broadcom Bluetooth (Jiska Classen, Dennis Mantz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nI9ok7iQg
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Linux on desktop users shouldn’t be bemused until Linux desktop experience isn’t a pile of UX trash. Linux on the desktop is still so frustrating, ugly, and only marginally more useful over a Mac for extremely specific use cases, that I would rather use Windows + WSL2.
I've become a wsl convert now as I can trust windows to deal with sleep/wakeup and wifi much better than linux. If macosx experiences a developer exodus I think it's likely many will follow suit. Especially with things like WSLg coming out
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#65So, I’m dumb about this stuff, but I have a wireless keyboard that uses a WiFi dongle to connect. I’ve lost connection with it a few times on my new m1 Mac. I had never lost connection with it in the previous 5 years. Could this be related to the phenomenon the authors are describing?
Dongles are usually not Bluetooth or WiFi. But sometimes share the same frequencies. The M1 MacBooks have been having Bluetooth issues. Not applicable to your dongle issue, but for others: One weird trick that works without fail for me is disabling WiFi, connecting your Bluetooth devices, and reenabling WiFi. Don’t know why it works.
To elaborate on this for GP, if a keyboard has its own wireless dongle, it is usually in the 2.4GHz frequency band, same as used by microwave ovens, Bluetooth, and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. The keyboard and/or dongle should list the frequency band it uses.
The Wi-Fi chipset in the computer is not used at all here. The dongle presents itself to the computer as a USB human input device, just like any other USB keyboard or mouse.
This is why you can use a keyboard like this to access the BIOS settings at boot time on a PC, which you can't do with a Bluetooth keyboard.
That said, the wireless connection between the dongle and the keyboard is subject to interference by other 2.4GHz devices.
So one thing to make sure of is to connect to a 5GHz Wi-Fi network, not 2.4GHz. And as you mentioned, Bluetooth can also interfere.
I had an interesting case of this some time ago. I was using a ThinkPad TrackPoint Wireless Keyboard II with a desktop computer on the floor several feet away. This keyboard can either use Bluetooth or its own USB dongle; I used the latter so I could access BIOS settings.
It worked great - except when I used my Bluetooth Apple AirPods with a phone (either iPhone or Android). Then the keyboard would start missing characters or repeating them wildly.
The solution was to use a USB extension cable to put the keyboard dongle on my desk near the keyboard itself. That improved the signal between the two and eliminated the Bluetooth interference.
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#66So, I’m dumb about this stuff, but I have a wireless keyboard that uses a WiFi dongle to connect. I’ve lost connection with it a few times on my new m1 Mac. I had never lost connection with it in the previous 5 years. Could this be related to the phenomenon the authors are describing?
Is it really wifi? Or is it Bluetooth?
Bluetooth wouldn't need a dongle on a modern computer. But I'd be surprised that it's wifi and not some other frequency radio communication.
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the issue with Broadcom chips?
Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either, they're a step above Realtek. Oddly Intel is well regarded though... It mostly comes down to drivers from what I understand but I'm not entirely familiar with all the objections.
> Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either
I always thought that it was funny that their NICs are much to be desired yet their ASICs power a wide variety of enterprise network switches capable of moving terabits of traffic at low latency.
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#68any advanced development on new macs is pretty rip
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they have not used them before the acquisition?
One of the recent phones (X or 11?) used Intel for part of its builds (as far as I remember you couldn’t tell from serial number). Apple had a lot of problems and swore off the Intel parts, which killed Intel’s wireless business. I assumed Apple bought the Intel product line for IP, especially after that episode.
Apple used Intel modems for many generations - the iPhone 7, X/8, XS, 11. For some generations they used Qualcomm chips in the models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't make a CDMA modem. So you could tell which chip you'd get from the iPhone model number.
Apple ditched Intel due to Intel being at least a year behind on 5G.
These modems were all LTE modems though. They've always used separate Broadcom chips for WiFi/Bluetooth.
Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken
#70Interesting 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.
Marconi is named after inventor of the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi?wprov=sfla1
Apple was a music label before it was a computer company. Before that, a fruit.