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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I don't much care about the software - I haven't used iTunes in years, don't use Mail, etc. etc. - it's the operating system I care about.

Wi-fi has been buggy on OS X for literally years now. And each new major release seems to bring some new pain point where it refuses to turn on, refuses to connect, doesn't transmit data... and on and on. There's no way Apple can't know about this - it must drive their own employees crazy. Yet, nothing gets done.

If I were in the market for a new laptop right now I'd be taking a serious look at a Surface Book - it's the first thing I've seen that looks like it could rival a Macbook in the hardware department. Sadly, I'd have to do a lot more research into getting a decent POSIX environment set up on it before I could take the plunge.

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Wi-Fi is crappy because Apple cuts lots of corners as a way to save battery life. Roaming can be a huge drain on the battery, so disabling or reducing the frequency of certain wireless functions is a quick and dirty way to improve battery life. It's so easy to pass off wireless problems to access points, so I imagine Apple had been doing it for years before anyone noticed.

That actually sounds like a legitimate strategy. I would want the device which is plugged into the wall to handle more of the heavy lifting if it means I get an extra hour of battery life.

I recently tried moving to Surface Book. Spent nearly $3k on a real nicely specc'd one. It BSOD'd daily, sleep modes are really confusing, battery drained terribly overnight, it was overall a bit of a nightmare. Granted probably half of my complaints are about Win10 rather than the SB itself, but still. I returned it.

It's SO CLOSE and it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.

Unfortunately the first generation of the Surface Book has been plagued with bugs. I avoided it assuming it would need a generation (or two) to get things right. But look where Microsoft took the Surface Pro in two generations. Surface Book is going to be amazing in a year or two. Heck, it might be there now, I hear a lot of the bugs have been fixed...but imo, it's not worth it right now. I say this as a very loyal Surface line customer.

I've found that wifi is buggy generally with lower end APs. It may be Apple employees generally have a better class of router/wifi

Recent Macs have a wifi chip that requires WME/WMM extensions (Wireless Multimedia) in most cases. For most APs it will have issues if these are switched off. Rumor is it's a chipset thing not a software thing.

Got any more information on that? I usually leave WMM off on account of it being extra complexity that doesn't seem to make anything work better, and I haven't noticed any particular issues with my six month old rMBP. Which chipsets are supposedly afflicted?

(side note: I wish they'd never stopped using Atheros WiFi.)

It was a while back and The Goog is not delivering, but I do distinctly remember this being an issue and that enabling this extension fixed it. But maybe only certain MBPs are affected.

That is my experience as well, with multiple APs. Once I switched to a better one (TP-Link Archer C7) the problems disappeared. Same with an airport express base station. No issues at all, wifi connection is near instant when the notebook wakes up.

Can anyone in this thread recommend a rock solid off-the-shelf wifi router?

The last year I have gone through three routers:

* Asus RT-N66U ("the Dark Knight"), worked fine on 2.5GHz, but the 5GHz signal gradually became worse until one day it just disppeared. Apparently a lot of users have had this issue.

* Asus RT-AC66U, the smaller version of the same router. Just stopped working occasionally, requiring a reboot.

* Netgear AC1750 R6400-100NAS (little brother to the "Nighthawk"). Current router, was stable enough for a while, but now needs rebooting a couple of times every week. SSL/TLS connections stop working randomly. Devices such as iPhone and AppleTV fail to get packets through on the first try after being dormant for a while.

At work we have the Netgear AC1900/R7000 "Nighthawk", which has been extremely stable. But it's also quite expensive, and large (as is the AC1750).

I've lost all faith in Asus, and the only other brand I can see that has a good reputation is Ubiquity. They make "pro" access points for hotels and such. Then again, hotel wifi is the worst.

I'd consider a Ubiquiti AP or a MikroTik. Both make solid devices for routing and wifi. Especially MikroTik offers some nice all-in-one devices. Never had a problem with them.

Mikrotik looks cool, never heard of them. But they only have one 5GHz (802.11ac) router, and it seems it came out recently? Not sure how I feel about jumping on something that new. I know nothing about the chipsets they use.

For wifi they use only Atheros chipsets because they write their own drivers and changing chipsets would require a complete rewrite for some of their custom stuff.

They had devices with 5 GHz before, just not in their SOHO devices. I've got two of their SXT lites (5 GHz) with directional antennas and my wireless uptime between them is around 70d.

Btw, the interface of their routers is a bit … verbose. I like it, but you should definitely have a look at it before you buy one of their routers: http://demo.mt.lv/webfig/

Even their cheapest devices come with a full copy of their OS, so you could just buy a hAP lite (~$25) and see if you like it. I did the same and never looked back.

Thanks! Placed an order for the hAP ac lite. Looking forward to setting it up.

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