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M1 Macbook Air (M1 MBA) 802.11ax/WiFi 6 is slow

I bought the M1 Macbook Air (M1 MBA) in part because it was the first Apple computer to FINALLY support 802.11ax/WiFi 6. It is frustrating to find that when connected to my WiFi 6 router, the connection is much slower than when connecting with 2.4GHz 802.11n. My other WiFi 6 devices work on WiFi 6 consistently and much faster in the same location.... Is this an Apple hardware problem? or something that will be fixed in an OS update?

Slow and unreliable WiFi seems to be a known problem with the M1 MBA in the Apple communities online and some users have reported USB/Thunderbolt connections as part of the problem. I tried with and without cables connected and if anything the signal got even slower and more unstable without USB-C devices connected.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.0

Posted on Jan 16, 2021 2:46 PM

Top-ranking reply

jeroneanderson1 Author

Level 1

22 points

Posted on Jan 19, 2021 2:06 PM

Thank you for the link. Unfortunately that did not help.

I have my router set as you suggest and OS X wireless diagnostics reports the connection as working normally. The MBA is not dropping the connection - what I mean by unreliable is that the speed goes from slow to extremely slow. This does not happen with any other WiFi 6 802.11ax devices connected to the same router.

The local LAN 802.11ax connection speed from the MBA should easily and consistently exceed my 100Mbit/s internet connection bottleneck. The image above shows a simple web based speed test run on the MBA (58.4Mbit) and on an HP laptop (107.7 Mbit) when connected using 802.11ax.

Attached is a screenshot of the same test run from my phone. As you can see, the MBA consistently underperforms other ax capable devices on my network which suggests the issue is not my router. Since OS X diagnostics can't detect a configuration issue, it leaves me thinking the ax hardware or firmware in the M1 MBA may be faulty. Do you have a reference WiFi access point at an Apple Store where I can demonstrate this problem and have it fixed? Is this a known issue with the M1 MBP as well or only the MBA?

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M1 Macbook Air (M1 MBA) 802.11ax/WiFi 6 is slow

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