Apple put its supa-spicy 802.11n into the MacBook, too?
By Paul Miller 
posted Nov 13th 2006 6:36PM
posted Nov 13th 2006 6:36PM
There's still no word from on high on this whole 802.11n biz, but it doesn't look like Apple is letting up on its "secret" insertion of 802.11n chips into its computer models, with the latest member of the wireless-n family naturally being the new Core 2 Duo MacBooks. We guessed as much, and ThinkSecret just spotted the telltale Atheros AR5008E chipset, the same one inside the C2D MacBook Pros. Of course, most people are pretty certain that Apple is doing this without updating drivers so that it can have a fancy unveil of its iTV device, with enough bandwidth to pull everything off, but our secret desire is that Apple just can't spare the manpower to write up a driver when everybody is busy coding away on that touchscreen / iPod / phone / time machine that we all know is just around the corner. And when have we ever steered you wrong?[Thanks, iData]
of course it's in there (like the other macs), and no the spec for 'n' still isn't done so don't expect much until then. iTV should hit before the standard.. that will be interesting if they open up the chips for iTV only.
well my wireless G works great on my MBP for streaming 720p WMV files to my 360 through Connect360, though I am using a pre-N router...
that being said, though, I don't think wireless N will be as big of a leap as wireless G was.
Why can some enterprising hacker just write a driver for this to take advantage of N today?
Matt B. wrote:
"Why can some enterprising hacker just write a driver for this to take advantage of N today?"
**just write a driver**?? No, sorry, but it isn't as simple as you've tried to show. There's a lot going on in wi-fi with the protocols, security modes, and other features. You don't "just write a driver" for it because you'd have to support b/g/n. You'd have to test your driver with all sorts of third party products for compatibility. And 802.11n incorporates multi-path transmissions to achieve all that data throughput, so the hacker would have to understand how that works or there's really no point.