Yeah, I recently disabled all location services on my M1 Mac mini after suffering over a year with constant wifi dropouts, not even poor latency but just no network for a few second every minute. Not sure who at Apple thinks this is an OK experience.
Generally their network stack is a mess. Trying to bridge ethernet to wifi just fundamentally doesn't work. The forwarding is randomly reconfigured every time the machine wakes up. I think they aren't paying attention to system level functionality.
> Not sure who at Apple thinks this is an OK experience
I'm sure nobody at Apple thinks it's an OK experience but obscure bugs that happen to a small fraction of users are hard to debug, especially when it comes to radio
It's funny, a lot of Apple's networking code is cribbed straight from the notoriously wonderful OpenBSD codebase. How did they manage to screw that up?
Has there ever been a time period where a BSD was known for having a notably better WiFi stack than Linux? I know the BSDs have a great reputation for their network stack overall and in particular the utilities for configuration (especially if you are willing to ignore the missing features), but I've never had the impression that there was any advantage specifically with regards to wireless. I seem to recall the BSDs historically having much narrower driver support and being years behind on features like 802.11ac.
OpenBSD was/is notorious for having terrible wireless drivers, but decent networking capabilities overall. You're right that the WiFi stack was never really any better than Linux, but BSD networking has long been a choice for high-traffic servers.
Bridging is a layer 2 operation, and both WiFi and wired ethernet are identical in that regard (and bluetooth ethernet encapsulation). It does work, on other operating systems.
Generally their network stack is a mess. Trying to bridge ethernet to wifi just fundamentally doesn't work. The forwarding is randomly reconfigured every time the machine wakes up. I think they aren't paying attention to system level functionality.