MCS and macOS, take 2

I had a previous post about macOS, but today I discovered that as of macOS Sonoma (14.4), the airport command has been deprecated. Here’s what I ran instead:

% system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | grep -A10 'Status: Connected' 
          Status: Connected
          Current Network Information:
            Flowers By Irene:
              PHY Mode: 802.11ax
              Channel: 37 (6GHz, 160MHz)
              Country Code: US
              Network Type: Infrastructure
              Security: WPA2/WPA3 Personal
              Signal / Noise: -38 dBm / -92 dBm
              Transmit Rate: 2401
              MCS Index: 11

Without the grep it will spit out a ton of information. There is another command that you can find documentation on, but it hides a lot of information:

% sudo wdutil info

Bonus, if you’re an old-school fan of Perl one-liners:

% system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | perl -0777 -ne 'print "$1\n" if /Current Network Information:\R(.*?MCS Index: .+?)\R/s'

That is actually more precise, because it will do a multi-line regular expression match until it gets to the end of the MCS index.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I was disappointed to discover that my shiny new $3,100 MacBook from November, 2024, has only Wi-Fi 6E. While I appreciate being able to connect to my Wi-Fi APs at 6 GHz, I wish it was via Wi-Fi 7. Heck, the iPhone 16 came out before this MacBook, and it has Wi-Fi 7 (albeit it maxes out at 160 MHz). But a 160 MHz channel is really quite fast unless I’m just being greedy. I do have a Minisforum MS-01 running Windows 11 on a Proxmox VM with a Wi-Fi 7 card at 320 MHz that gets me 3+ Gbps of actual throughput, so I can’t complain too much.