Can I switch a MacBook Pro air 2013 ac wireless card...
to a macbook pro retina 13 to make it have ac connection?
From the teardown, if i dont get it wrong, ac card is shorter then the old n card?
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Sorry to burst your bubble here.
You forgot to read the fine print and I quote "These tests found that 802.11ac only provided 5% performance gains over 802.11n"
You face many issues in doing the swap out. The PCIe & antenna/s in your system may not be capable to leveraging this faster WiFi card. Just because it fits (sorta...) does not mean its going to work as you expect. Davids' write up on his swapping the WiFi boards around proves it.
Besides, you can't buy the AC board on the open market at this time. This is a custom built board for Apple and the supplies for it will be very tight for quite some time as they ramp up the other systems with AC boards.
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No - hardware is not compatible it just isn't practical
If this Answer is helpful please remember to return and mark it Accepted.
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but i saw people doing that on the internet
Great - why don't you make a guide and post it - I'd like to see the solution for the size difference.
The most likely reason they didn't put ac into earlier models would be the base station wasn't ready to go.
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The antenna is compatible, assuming the logic board connector is compatible, it will work at least
About the performance, wifi cards on MBAs does not support MIMO, so it works in 150Mbps for 802.11n, 450Mbps for 802.11ac. While RMBP wifi cards use 3*3 MIMO which gets you 450M for 802.11n.(assuming your wifi AP support it)
So no point upgrading it anyway
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Tom it does fit and work (up to a point). Read the supplied link. The issue is it still makes no sense as the minor performance gain is not worth the work and you just can't get the part.
Sorry, Dan, I was too tired and mistakenly believed that he was trying to fit the ac card into an older MBA.
The older MacBook (Pros & Air's) antennas are not setup for AC service & no adapter needed for the similar older PCIe version of the board.
Tom - Sometimes it just makes sense upping someone's score instead of blurring the answer with a duplicate answer that doesn't add anything useful (given the question and the person asking skill set).
Macbook airs since 2010 all use very same antenna configuration. One for 2.4G and one for 5G. AC works on 5G. there is no protocol specific antenna requirements. Pros use 3 dual band antennas so it simply works.
