New iMacs & Macbook Pro at 450 Mb/s

[alexalex]

among the new features of the 2011 MacBook Pro, there is one that we had not noticed, it that it supports Wi-Fi with a speed reaching 450 Mb/s. We hadn't seen how important it was until we switched an 802.11n Wi-Fi network to 5 GHz with extended channels (the 2.4 GHz was overloaded).

The computer then connected to a Time Capsule (simultaneous dual-band model) at the maximum speed as you can see on this screenshot.

Of course, we ran a few tests and we were very surprised of what we saw. In both ways, Time Capsule to computer and reverse we got data transfer rates as high as 22 MB/s in the same room and 9 MB/s in another room with a concrete wall in between, which is not the best condition for a 5 GHz band.

It is quite an important improvement since with the older models of MacBook Pro, in similar conditions, our record was 14.6 MB/s in the same room and 5.5 MB/s from a distance.

It is quite an impressive improvement, plus we didn't know that the Airport Base station and Time Capsule (we tested both) currently sold by Apple did support that bandwidth.

http://www.hardmac.com/news/2011/04/15/airport-test-at-450-mb-s

iMac EFI Update 1.6 Update boost SATA throughput for two of three channels to 6Gbps.

Whence comes all of this goodness? The new iMac and MacBook Pro have three antennas inside?

[cooky560 Veteran]

I feel really stupid buying my iMac a week before these new ones come out :(

[instant.human]

I feel really stupid buying my iMac a week before these new ones come out :(

You used to be able to go to the Apple Store and get one of the upgraded ones if you bought an old one up to 14 days before the new ones came out. One could at least try it.

[Argi]

Saw this posted on other forums. If you're interested in this outside the Apple eco-sphere, the Linksys E4200 does the job of the router.

[amon91]

You used to be able to go to the Apple Store and get one of the upgraded ones if you bought an old one up to 14 days before the new ones came out. One could at least try it.

Yes, that's an actual program, I'd do that. The new ones probably don't bring any advantage, aside from Thunderbold, but a modest spec boost could come in handy 5 years down the road once you're struggling with system requirements and still want to make use of that computer.

[Roger H. Veteran]

Nothing to really do with Apple per say (not that you were implying that). It's simply the Intel 5300/6300 Wifi cards and a compatible router (Linksys E4200 and the Netgear WNDR4000 right now and apparently the Apple Airport Extreme) will show a connection of 450Mbps. I have the a Thinkpad T410s now with a Intel 6300 but my T400 with the Intel 5300 can do the same as well and that's from 2009, there just no routers that were 3 stream capable at the time when i got it.

[ahhell]

Woooo a whole 22MB/s transfer rate. Exciting.

What's the point of having wireless on a desktop when you can only get that as transfer rate?

[Roger H. Veteran]

Well I guess for the most part it's pretty good but nobody expects that to be doing work over LAN (iSCSI) at those speeds. I'm sure anyone that wanted to actually copy a few 100GBs of stuff would do it over GIGe LAN as in that case I can get 60MB/s (limitation of my HDD in my laptop) over LAN. For the casual user though that may just want to stream some photos and few videos from the home server or copy a few hundred MBs from their camera after a trip to Vegas or whatever, this speed is more than fast enough.