Wow, made pretty much the same discoveries today trying to back up 1.75TB of photo data from my NAS across MacOS Sonoma to a SSD via the finder. Ended up doing exactly the same thing as this article concludes, booted up Windows11 PC and got the whole thing done at a consistently faster transfer rate. Sigh.

I found out something shocking that could be related to this. AWDL, the proprietary protocol behind AirDrop, will exclusively use channel 6 on 2.4ghz networks and channel 49 (in the US) on 5ghz networks to find any nearby clients, and it’ll look for them about once a second. That means if your WiFi network isn’t broadcasting on those channels, any Apple device that doesn’t have AirDrop disabled will constantly be switching WiFi channels to check for this and switching back. I learned this when trying to get VR streaming over WiFi to a Vision Pro and found very consistent lag spikes once a second until I changed channels on my WiFi router.

Yes, because Apple used to have AFP, a filesharing protocol that was magnitudes better and faster than SMB and they had zero interest in having a decent SMB implementation because it was the competition after all. They eventually decided to discontinue AFP and left everyone with the mess their SMB implementation is. To make things worse they never cared to implement NFS shared on their UI.

Any solutions?