5 ms·

And sadly, I own two out of three of those. It's worth noting that the Realtek is crap, even ignoring the OSX driver situation. I have a few of the 2.5GBe dong

And sadly, I own two out of three of those. It's worth noting that the Realtek is crap, even ignoring the OSX driver situation. I have a few of the 2.5GBe dongles to make my synology speak 2.5gb/s (because a modern NAS is 2020 should have more then gigabit, but doens't because reasons). The driver in Linux is hot mess. I seem to have much more luck then some with it.

jandrese 5y ago
Realtek chips have been garbage since the 90s. But they have also been the cheapest option for just as long so you see them absolutely everywhere, especially with third party accessories. It is typical to see hardware errata documents several pages thick from them, if they provide support at all. Getting the drivers working well is pure masochism as you have to deal with the terrible documentation (if you have it at all) and the abysmal quality of the hardware. But they have turned their garbage products into a multi-billion dollar company and that's all that really matters in the world of business. Whichever chip is the cheapest is the one that every accessory maker will use. It is rare that a company can break through with a product that advertises higher quality components but at a higher price, or they end up with such a massive premium on what should be a modest increase in BoM that the value proposition still doesn't make sense. As a sidenote this is exactly what I expected to happen as laptop manufacturers started aggressively cutting ports from their machines. You have to switch to dongles, but dongles suck and the total experience is much worse than having a laptop that is 2mm thicker.
ridiculous_fish 5y ago
Do you know of any alternative to the RTL8153 (1Gbe) and RTL8156 (2.5GBe) chips? The only competitors seems to be AQC111U, which appear to not be supported on ARM Macs, and AX88179 whose support appears spotty as well. Any experience with either?
- microtonal 5y ago
  A Thunderbolt dock or adapter that puts the NIC on the PCI-E bus, like Apple's Thunderbolt 2 Ethernet adapter (which annoyingly requires a Thunderbolt 2 -> 3 adapter). I know that some Thunderbolt docks also use Intel NICs, but I don't have one of these, so I cannot recommend any model.

jandrese 5y ago

Realtek chips have been garbage since the 90s. But they have also been the cheapest option for just as long so you see them absolutely everywhere, especially with third party accessories. It is typical to see hardware errata documents several pages thick from them, if they provide support at all. Getting the drivers working well is pure masochism as you have to deal with the terrible documentation (if you have it at all) and the abysmal quality of the hardware. But they have turned their garbage products into a multi-billion dollar company and that's all that really matters in the world of business. Whichever chip is the cheapest is the one that every accessory maker will use. It is rare that a company can break through with a product that advertises higher quality components but at a higher price, or they end up with such a massive premium on what should be a modest increase in BoM that the value proposition still doesn't make sense. As a sidenote this is exactly what I expected to happen as laptop manufacturers started aggressively cutting ports from their machines. You have to switch to dongles, but dongles suck and the total experience is much worse than having a laptop that is 2mm thicker.

ridiculous_fish 5y ago

Do you know of any alternative to the RTL8153 (1Gbe) and RTL8156 (2.5GBe) chips? The only competitors seems to be AQC111U, which appear to not be supported on ARM Macs, and AX88179 whose support appears spotty as well. Any experience with either?

microtonal 5y ago
A Thunderbolt dock or adapter that puts the NIC on the PCI-E bus, like Apple's Thunderbolt 2 Ethernet adapter (which annoyingly requires a Thunderbolt 2 -> 3 adapter). I know that some Thunderbolt docks also use Intel NICs, but I don't have one of these, so I cannot recommend any model.