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Comment by tommoor | Hacker News Reader

Nice, added it as a bash alias.

    alias randommac='sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport en0 -z && sudo ifconfig en0 ether $(openssl rand -hex 6 | sed "s/../&:/g; s/:$//")'

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So I tried this out on macOS 26 and the `airport` command is no longer there.

There is a `airportd.sb` file, which appears to be some permissions based thing in s-expression/LISP. Weird.

Edit: Spun up a macOS 15 VM and I got this:

WARNING: The airport command line tool is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. For diagnosing Wi-Fi related issues, use the Wireless Diagnostics app or wdutil command line tool.

I guess they weren't kidding.

Looking around briefly, you can replace it with this:

`networksetup -setairportpower en0 on && [... set MAC ...] && networksetup -setairportpower en0 off`

I think it's pretty safe to assume that modern Macs will always have en0 as the WiFi adapter, but if you wanted, you could use `networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder` to find the associated device.

Modern Macs do not always have en0 as the WiFi adapter (it's en1 on current iMacs and on the Mac Studio; en0 is the ethernet jack).

But you're unlikely to be taking one of the machines that has built-in ethernet to the airport or coffeeshop.

Duh, also true on my Mac Mini. But yeah, “modern Mac laptops” probably makes the statement correct enough and still describes the entire set of targets.

So this doesn't work if your wifi nic is associated with an SSID. `airport -z` disassociates the SSID.

Can't seem to find a CLI command to do the same in macOS 26, but I haven't looked too hard either.

Airport has been deprecated for a year or two. Here's an article talking about its deprecation and its relatively nonfunctional replacement: wdutil https://www.intuitibits.com/2024/03/14/goodbye-airport/

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