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Comment by moritzwarhier | Hacker News Reader

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 wireless internet simultaneously with Bluetooth unlesss being in the same room next to my router.

With apple client hardware and the same router (it also supports 5GHz, but I'm not sure if that's the underlying cause as it still works great on 2.4GHz with the MacBook), WiFi and BT work flawlessly across my whole apartment.

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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.

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.

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.

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

Apple's WiFi and BlueTooth interference sucks tho. There are multiple reports of jagged moused cursor movement when using BT. Switching to wired fixes the problem. But it's weird that even Apple's MagicTrackPad doesn't work well with my MBP if I use it wirelessly :/

I use an MS keyboard + mouse with its own USB transceiver for wireless (Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop). So to be fair I haven't tried BT keyboards. AFAIK it's also 2.4GHz but not Bluetooth.

For me its mainly WiFi+BT Audio that I care about.

A surprisingly high number of my previous Lenovo devices had the problem that using both simultaneously would lead one of the two connections to drop. On Windows and Linux. The extent of the problem varied, the worst offender was a cheap Windows convertible, but my 2019 Ryzen 7 ThinkPad also exhibits this problem sometimes.

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.

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

It's the OS coordinating them to not fight (desense tuning.)

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.

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