[PhrogDriver]

Can anyone verify a difference in reception between the MBP and the MB? I thought I read that the MB plastic case allowed better reception, but a search of the forumn did not turn up any results. Thanks.

[MacosNerd]

I've owned both and I can say that the MBP's wireless reception is the same as the MB's, I think that issue was early on when apple introduced the alu. g4 powerbook. Since then, they've made improvements to get around the issue of having an alu. enclosure.

I'd look more towards which model better fits your needs. The MB's plastic case is more durable, and the size makes for easier travel or throwing it in your backpack. The MBA has a larger screen, more ports and a better GPU.

Since I owning both I came to the conclusion that the MB was not a good fit for my needs, I needed a larger screen and something that could handle Aperture and photoshop. While PS relies more on the cpu and less on the GPU, I found it difficult to use PS on a 13" screen.

It all depends on your needs, budget and planned usage.

[mduell]

Part of the hinge on the MBP/MBA is plastic to improve wifi range.

My MBA has zero wifi range when the lid is closed, but it's ok when the lid is open.

[peeb]

All the Aluminium Powerbooks have terrible wi-fi range.

[amazing]

The wireless reception issue is very hard to assess, because people always refer to "bars of reception." Apple seems to have changed to "bars of reception" to refer to "quality of reception", a rather meaningless standard, because you can no longer generalize from model to model. 4 bars of reception on MBP may not mean the same thing as 4 bars of reception on MB.

The only way to test this would be having MB and MBP side-by-side, and comparing throughput. iStumbler might be able to give comparative Signal-to-Noise ratios. I don't know of anyone who has done such research, though.

MacWorld magazine used to compare wireless range in prehistoric (ie pre-Intel-historic) times (iBook vs Ti and later AlPB.) Metal always, always came out much worse--but bars of reception showed the same number of bars. The last time they did such a test, they also compared Apple's Airport WAPs to other brands, and Apple's WAPs were as much as 20-30% worse in range and throughput. The lack of external antennas on the Airports was very telling. They must've caught a lot of flack from Apple on that, because they've never attempted anything like that since.

You'll notice that MacWorld's laptop reviews no longer even talk about wireless reception, whereas they used to in the past.

You'd probably get more response if you posted this in the networking forum.

Your post prompted me to pull up iStumbler: mine is the only WAP in the neighborhood, and channel 6 was giving me 46 signal strength, with up to 40 noise. I changed it to channel 9 and I'm now getting 50 signal strength and 12 noise. Bars of reception are exactly the same.

[Cold Warrior]

AirMoose gives a Signal column and Noise (separately). Signal seems to be measured in RSSI. The closer to zero, the better. You can use that to assess signal strength across different machines.