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How to be a Hardware Detective |
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Written by Greg Neagle
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Tuesday, 28 March 2006 |
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Apple uses components from third-party vendors in its own products. When troubleshooting an issue, it is sometimes helpful to determine the OEM part. Apple does not usually publish this info, but with a little work, you can discover this info.
With the release of the MacBook Pro, some organizations reported various issues with the Airport card inlcuded with this model. But what exactly _is_ the Airport card?
A trip to System Profiler and a look under the Hardware/PCI Cards category shows that it has a Vendor ID of 0x168c, and a Device ID of 0x001c. These two fields should uniquely identify any PCI device.
 MacBook Pro - System Profiler - Hardware -> PCI Cards If System Profiler doesn't give you this info, try looking at the output of `ioreg -l`
If you visit www.pcidatabase.com and enter the vendor ID, we find that 0x168c is Atheros Communications, a vendor of wireless cards.
See www.pcidatabase.com/vendor_details.php?id=174
Unfortunately, there's no listing for device ID 0x001c for Atheros at www.pcidatabase.com, but a little more Googling uncovers that it's an "Atheros AR5006X Wireless Network Adapter."
Using these detective techniques, we discovered that the currently shipping MacBook Pros and Mac minis share the same Atheros wireless card; the Intel iMac uses a Broadcom 4312 chipset. So they use different drivers, and presumably might encounter different issues in a given environment.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 14 July 2006 )
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