Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The networkQuality tool on macOS

cyberhost.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 92 posts

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#81

Post by elabajaba »

garganzol wrote: post #64
moritzwarhier wrote: post #63

Tangentially related: the wirelles chips that Apple uses make a world of a difference compared to my other machines (Lenovo ThinkPads in cheap to low-mid price range). They have signal where other devices don't, and, most importantly, Bluetooth does not interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi in a crowded apartment building in a crowded street. This makes a world of a difference. With my previous laptop, I simply couldn't use wir…

This situation was greatly improved over the last 9 years. A modern machine with Wi-Fi from Asus, Lenovo, Dell etc works as good as Apple, if not better. * Having both ASUS Vivobook and Apple M1 on my desk - Vivobook does it better in a particular environment of my house.

If they're using Intel wifi I agree. I got a Lenovo laptop a couple years ago that used a realtek card for wifi+Bluetooth and the Bluetooth was unusable with my headphones (windows and Linux). Swapping it for a $20 Intel chip fixed all my issues.

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#82

Post by sokoloff »

wtallis wrote: post #72
nottorp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's the antenna design not the actual chips?

Some of it is probably that Apple uses chips supporting three antennas instead of just two.

That varies by model (maybe the Airs all have 2, but certainly the older ones do, whereas a MBP from the same era has 3).

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#83

Post by shagie »

BrianHutch wrote: post #59
meinheld111 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sometimes latency is more important than max bandwidth we probably could have stuck with sneakernet if it wasn‘t more important most of the time

"never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes" as the old saying goes.

Consider the data connections from Arecibo or Ice Cube (which has many of the same problems).

From Wikipedia:

> Observational data were recorded on 2-terabyte SATA hard disk drives fed from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, each holding about 2.5 days of observations, which were then sent to Berkeley. Arecibo does not have a broadband Internet connection, so data must go by postal mail to Berkeley.

https://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/~korpela/papers/CISE.pdf

> This 2.5-MHz band is recorded continuously onto 35 Gbyte DLT tapes using 2-bit complex samples. Each tape holds about 15.5 hours of data. The entire sky survey is expected to require 1,100 tapes, for a total of 39 Tbytes of data.

> The recorded tapes are shipped to Berkeley, where we subdivide them into small work units on four splitter workstations. ...

---

https://icecube.wisc.edu/about-us/facts/

> One terabyte of unfiltered data is collected daily and about 100 gigabytes are sent over satellite for analysis.

It's better now (the South Pole does have a broadband link)... but Ice Cube is only sending 10% of its data.

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#84

Post by kiwijamo »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #63

Tangentially related: the wirelles chips that Apple uses make a world of a difference compared to my other machines (Lenovo ThinkPads in cheap to low-mid price range). They have signal where other devices don't, and, most importantly, Bluetooth does not interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi in a crowded apartment building in a crowded street. This makes a world of a difference. With my previous laptop, I simply couldn't use wir…

I've had both Apple and Lenovo laptops over the years and both seem to perform similarly on my mixed 2.4GHz and 5GHz network. Lenovo have always been Intel WiFi chips whereas Apple seems to go for other brands such as Broadcom. I find it's the WiFi AP side of the equation that makes the biggest difference and not necessarily the laptop itself. I've gone through different WiFi APs over the years and the differences between the bad ones and the good ones is night and day. The good ones just works with all devices, and ensures each device gets a fair share of traffic. Good ones include Ubiquiti, Ruckus etc. Netgear Orbi has been pretty good too and is my current setup.

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#85

Post by wtallis »

sokoloff wrote: post #82
wtallis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it is probably that Apple uses chips supporting three antennas instead of just two.

That varies by model (maybe the Airs all have 2, but certainly the older ones do, whereas a MBP from the same era has 3).

Looks like just two on the current MacBook Air: https://www.ifixit.com/News/62674/m2-macbook-air-teardown-ap...

I was partly influenced by memories of scavenging WiFi cards from early Intel MBPs with failed NVIDIA GPUs and buying adapters (with 3 antennas) to add WiFi to desktops in an era where that was not close to standard.

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#86

Post by hackmiester »

kiwijamo wrote: post #84
moritzwarhier wrote: post #63

Tangentially related: the wirelles chips that Apple uses make a world of a difference compared to my other machines (Lenovo ThinkPads in cheap to low-mid price range). They have signal where other devices don't, and, most importantly, Bluetooth does not interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi in a crowded apartment building in a crowded street. This makes a world of a difference. With my previous laptop, I simply couldn't use wir…

I've had both Apple and Lenovo laptops over the years and both seem to perform similarly on my mixed 2.4GHz and 5GHz network. Lenovo have always been Intel WiFi chips whereas Apple seems to go for other brands such as Broadcom. I find it's the WiFi AP side of the equation that makes the biggest difference and not necessarily the laptop itself. I've gone through different WiFi APs over the years and the differences be…

That surely makes a bit of difference. But, I corroborate the ideas about the clients' differing abilities as well.

We run Microsoft and Apple workstations at work, but for Wi-Fi planning reasons, we keep some cheap laptops around as well. If we only test with our good machines, some issues will be invisible to us. And since I am in higher ed, many students cannot afford the high end computers, but they still need the service to work, so we have to test with cheap computers with terrible Wi-Fi chips, which reveals issues that are invisible to the latest Macs/Surface Pro machines.

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#87

Post by bonestamp2 »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #63

Tangentially related: the wirelles chips that Apple uses make a world of a difference compared to my other machines (Lenovo ThinkPads in cheap to low-mid price range). They have signal where other devices don't, and, most importantly, Bluetooth does not interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi in a crowded apartment building in a crowded street. This makes a world of a difference. With my previous laptop, I simply couldn't use wir…

Agreed, I returned a cheap dell when my macbooks that were further from the access point still had a signal and the dell did not. I do have a T-Series ThinkPad and the range on that is comparable to my macbooks.

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#88

Post by jfarmer »

jijojv wrote: post #68
jfarmer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nice thing about macOS is that many of the system GUI tools are graphical wrappers around a command-line tool that does the real work. Most of them live in /usr/sbin I keep a list for my students. Here are some: diskutil mdfind mdutil plutil networksetup softwareupdate screencapture pmset hdiutil pkgutil caffeinate osascript defaults launchctl For example, mdfind lets you use Spotlight search on the command line.…

Very Nice! One caveat is that say won't speak the "minus" if your SNR became negative. echo '-30' | say echo '\-30' | say

Thanks!

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#89

Post by jfarmer »

comex wrote: post #76
jfarmer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nice thing about macOS is that many of the system GUI tools are graphical wrappers around a command-line tool that does the real work. Most of them live in /usr/sbin I keep a list for my students. Here are some: diskutil mdfind mdutil plutil networksetup softwareupdate screencapture pmset hdiutil pkgutil caffeinate osascript defaults launchctl For example, mdfind lets you use Spotlight search on the command line.…

Nitpick: In general, the graphical tools don’t literally invoke the command-line tools. Rather, both the graphical tool and the command-line tool use the same C or Objective-C API (usually private and undocumented) provided by some system framework. But the command-line tools do tend to be more direct reflections of the underlying API, and more flexible.

Oops.

Yeah, I knew some of them did and then at some point I just started tossing more programs in the list as I ran across them.

Re: The networkQuality tool on macOS

#90

Post by moritzwarhier »

kiwijamo wrote: post #84
moritzwarhier wrote: post #63

Tangentially related: the wirelles chips that Apple uses make a world of a difference compared to my other machines (Lenovo ThinkPads in cheap to low-mid price range). They have signal where other devices don't, and, most importantly, Bluetooth does not interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi in a crowded apartment building in a crowded street. This makes a world of a difference. With my previous laptop, I simply couldn't use wir…

I've had both Apple and Lenovo laptops over the years and both seem to perform similarly on my mixed 2.4GHz and 5GHz network. Lenovo have always been Intel WiFi chips whereas Apple seems to go for other brands such as Broadcom. I find it's the WiFi AP side of the equation that makes the biggest difference and not necessarily the laptop itself. I've gone through different WiFi APs over the years and the differences be…

If I am not mistaken, the laptop causing most of my problems was a very cheap ThinkPad from the E-series, which is not quite comparable to other models of the TP line, even when buying one of the better / more expensive ones.

The one I was using shipped a very bad Wifi chip branded as Realtek. Complaints about it are all over the web (E595, Ryzen 7 with 16GB RAM in my case)

This is an extreme case, but I had similar problems with other devices, albeit not as extreme.

Using Wifi lead to a full connection drop for BT or vice-versa. To be fair, the offending device was a dirt cheap Windows 10 "convertible"/tablet from 2016.

Other devices (e.g. cheap Android smartphones) just suffered from bad signal reach / quality / channel negotiation.

Never had a smartphone with as many problems as those cheap Lenovo laptops though.

I'd expect ThinkPads and other Wintel Laptops with better chipsets to be on par with apple, so yes, it's not a fair comparison.

It's just not a problem that everyone has on their bullet list of criteria to choose a computer. Similar to TDP, battery replacability, trackpad quality, laptop speakers, etc

Post reply on HN