In my experience it is not so that only the Apple made Ethernet adapter works with Macs. Setup a small test environment as described in the linked answer so you can eliminate the unreliability of the Internet connection and limit your test to variables you can control. Avoid the inexpensive off brand adapters and stick to brands like Belkin, Anker, Netgear, etc.

As far as the comment re: Apple branded Ethernet adapters, the answer is any quality adapter with a compatible chipset will work and perform just fine.

I actually address the “quality” issue in this post: AX88179 ethernet adapter keeps dropping connection. However, it can be affected by the quality of the adapter and/or the inherent throughput inconsistencies of the Internet. Same for your transfer speeds - what you’re seeing is well below USB 2 throughput. USB speeds and feeds have nothing to do with this. In your example, the variance in your ping results - 12ms vs 24ms could be due to the quality of your adapter and/or inherent latency of your internet connection. High quality USB to Ethernet adapters will have low latency (ping results) and higher throughput (iPerf3 results). It’s free snd simple to use.Īs for differences in performance, it comes down to the quality of the USB bridge in the adapter and the quality of the Ethernet chip itself they’re not all created equal. You need to use the iPerf3 utility to measure the performance internally. Your question is very similar to this one: What dowload speeds is the Apple USB Ethernet Adapter capable of? You need to do this internally where you control the variables. You can’t evaluate adapter performance by measuring Internet latency and throughput because those things change - like the Network congestion and load of your service provider at that tine.

Mac ethernet connection