Comment Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period. (Score 1) 120
Considering I have never spent a penny on any Apple product or service, and have no stock invested in Apple, I'm not sure how the label "fanboy" makes any sense whatsoever.
Just because *you've* not had any particular problem doesn't mean that problems don't exist. I have the unfortunate pleasure of having a reputation as a person who is knowledgable in general about computing, so pretty much everyone I know who isn't technically savvy themselves will invariably come to me when they have problems.
I've had to deal with a small handful of old laptop HDD crashes, USB port failures, botched Firefox updates, malware, etc. in my years of being unable to say "no" to a desperate user who needs my help to fix their shit. But I can count the number of these instances on one hand per incident type.
On the other hand, I have responded to maybe 100 different requests that go along the lines of "my WiFi won't connect" or "my WiFi is slower than dial-up" or "my WiFi keeps dropping out". Sometimes these instances involve Apple devices; sometimes not. Often times, they involve devices from different manufacturers. Very often, they involve people who live in tight spaces like apartments or dorms, where WiFi from next door (and downstairs, and upstairs...) can pollute the WiFi spectrum within your own dwelling.
Maybe I'm just really unlucky and I have friends who make poor choices in their purchase of WiFi-using devices, but the disproportionate ratio of WiFi-related problems to non-WiFi problems suggests to me that there are metric tons of devices out there with broken WiFi implementations.
The reputation and legacy of WiFi as a protocol will be judged by whether it could be implemented reliably and consistently, so don't say "that's not a critique on WiFi itself". If even a significant minority (say, 30%) of the implementors can't be arsed to do it *properly* in such a way that you don't get pathetic issues like a link that's capped at 2.8 kbit/s, that should say a lot about the spec, the standards organization, and the verification & validation (or lack thereof) surrounding WiFi.
And while we're on about anecdotal personal evidence, I've got a Note 4 and a current-generation Linksys USB adapter that both claim to speak 5 GHz 802.11ac, and I get random dropouts when the devices are within 10 feet of one another and not being moved.
I randomly fire up a wifi heat map on my phone when I get the dropouts, and not a single other device in the area is talking on 5 GHz. I don't own a cordless telephone and there are no other dwellings near enough that a cordless phone could be the problem. 2.4 GHz, while noisier, exhibits the same problem. I've tried with 3 different driver releases too, and the problem persisted after a Note 4 OTA claiming to fix WiFi issues.
Then again, my personal experience is just one data point. There's no way I'd claim that to be any kind of a representative sample. I've got a few dozen friends/colleagues/associates -- technically savvy and otherwise -- who would be eager to tell you about their (sometimes ongoing, sometimes former) WiFi woes.