In case you’re wondering, the newly announced M4 MacBook Air and Mac Studio only support Wi-Fi 6E.
Apple is Not Shipping the M4 MacBook Air and Mac Studio with Wi-Fi 7, Still Using Wi-Fi 6E – But is that a Problem?
With iPhone 16, Apple really stepped up its W-Fi game by including support for Wi-Fi 7. And with Multi-Link Operation support in those smartphones, you get super-fast download and upload speeds too.
The new MacBook Air with M4 and all versions of the Mac Studio include support for Wi-Fi 6E only. What this means is, if you have a Wi-Fi 6E-supported router, you can enjoy those fast local and internet speeds on the 6GHz band.
But if you have a Wi-Fi 7 router, you’ll fall back to using one band at a time, either 5GHz or 6GHz, depending on whether you have a dual-band or tri-band router.
I somewhat agree with Apple on this decision. See, the thing is, it’s better to ship a computer with a widely accepted wireless standard than something so new that you’ll probably never get to use it at all.
With Mac Studio, users are likely going to hard-wire this computer to the internet over Ethernet, so having the latest Wi-Fi standard doesn’t make much sense.
A typical MacBook Air buyer finds themselves in a wide variety of situations. Usually, these users will either connect to a Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6 network on the go. Even at the time of writing, Wi-Fi 6E is a fairly new standard.
Trust me, things move very slowly in the world of Wi-Fi.
As someone who digs way too deep into Wi-Fi, having 6E around is absolutely fine. No one is ever going to notice the difference, unless you count each and every single megabyte of data that leaves your device.
Remember, if you live in a country where the 6GHz band is not cleared for use, you’ll fall back to using 5GHz only.
