The new iMac does 450 Mb/s WiFi

The latest iMac family is full of surprises and one overlooked enhancement is the inclusion of souped up WiFi capable of hitting 450 Mbps speeds over wireless networks. Hardmac spotted a reference to this capability in the iMac’s system information. Apple first brought rhe 450Mbps WiFi features in the 2011 MacBook Pro family, but they haven’t been actively advertising it.

Apple changed their Airport card and also installed 3 antennas (instead of 2 before), something indispensable to be able simultaneously to use 3 channels of 150 Mbits/s.

In order to take advantage of the 450Mbps data transfer you need a compatible base station (either the current-generation Airport Extreme or Time Capsule). Make sure to connect to the base station using the 802.11n mode on the five gigahertz band GHz, with the simultaneous dual-band mode turned on.

Of course, real-life speed varies depending on a number of conditions, such as your wireless reception, room configuration, interference and so forth.

Hardmac was able to achieve wireless data speeds of about 22 megabytes per second between a 2011 MacBook Pro and a base station.

This compares to the 14.6 megabytes per second achieved on the previous generation MacBook Pros.