> All MacBook Pro models feature an HDMI port that supports up to 8K resolution, a SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 port for charging, and a headphone jack, along with support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.
No Wifi 7. So you get access to the 6 GHz band, but not some of the other features (preamble punching, OFDMA):
The iPhone 16s do have Wifi 7. Curious to know why they skipped it (and I wonder if the chipsets perhaps do support it, but it's a firmware/software-not-yet-ready thing).
I was quite surprised by this discrepancy as well (my new iPhone has 7, but the new MBP does not).
I had just assumed that for sure this would be the year I upgrade my M1 Max MBP to an M4 Max. I will not be doing so knowing that it lacks WiFi 7; as one of the child comments notes, I count on getting a solid 3 years out of my machine, so future-proofing carries some value (and I already have WiFi7 access points), and I download terabytes of data in some weeks for the work I do, and not having to Ethernet in at a fixed desk to do so efficiently will be a big enough win that I will wait another year before shelling out $6k “off-cycle”.
Big bummer for me. I was looking forward to performance gains next Friday.
Hm why? Is 6E really so much worse than 7 in practice that 7 can replace wired for you but 6E can't? That's honestly really weird to me. What's the practical difference in latency, bandwidth or reliability you've experienced between 6E and 7?
I don’t have any 6E device so I cannot really tell for sure but from what I read, 6E gets you to a bit over 1Gbit in real world scenario. 7 should be able to replace my 2.5Gbe dongle or at least get much closer to it. I already have routers WiFi 7 Eeros on a 2.5Gbe wired backbone.
I guess it makes sense if what you do is extremely throughput-focused... I always saw consistency/reliability and latency as the benefits of wired compared to wireless, the actual average throughput has felt fast enough for a while on WiFi but I guess other people may have different needs
Laptops/desktops (with 16GB+ of memory) could make use of the faster speed/more bandwidth aspects of WiFi7 better than smartphones (with 8GB of memory).
> It looks like few people only are using Wifi 7 for now.
Machines can last and be used for years, and it would be a presumably very simple way to 'future proof' things.
And though the IEEE spec hasn't officially been ratified as I type this, it is set to be by the end of 2024. Network vendors are also shipping APs with the functionality, so in coming years we'll see a larger and larger infrastructure footprint going forward.
Yeah, this threw me as well. When the iMac didn’t support WiFi 7, I got a bit worried. I have an M2, so not going to get this, but the spouse needs a new Air and I figure that everything would have WiFi 7 by then, and now I don’t think so.
Faster is always nice, makes sense. But do you really need WiFi 7 features/speed? I don't know when I would notice a difference (on a laptop) between 600 or 1500 Mbit/s (just as an example). Can't download much anyhow as the storage will get full in minutes.
wifi 6 can’t do shit given that there’s crazy overlap if you go for 80MHz channels. Most situations tap out around 700Mbps over usually a 40MHz channel.
Wifi 6e/7 6GHz band with a bunch of non overlapping 160MHz channels is where the juice is at. But even then a lot of devices are limited to smaller channel widths.
No Wifi 7. So you get access to the 6 GHz band, but not some of the other features (preamble punching, OFDMA):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_6E
The iPhone 16s do have Wifi 7. Curious to know why they skipped it (and I wonder if the chipsets perhaps do support it, but it's a firmware/software-not-yet-ready thing).