Chosen Solution

Will the Air port 802.11ac Wi-Fi card fit into a 2012 15 inch retina MacBook Pro? or if it fits will it work?

So far Apple has released two different AirPort boards for the laptop systems. The first one had two antenna connections and the newest model has three. Then there is the issue of the antennas them selves. The size and placement of the antennas is also very important otherwise they will not work properly (limiting your throughput). As these systems are so new no one has made the needed studies to fully understand what Apple has done. You might want to review this thread Will it work? As you can see there is a bit of debate on the subject ;-} In any case the part is still not available and I don’t think it will be for quite sometime as Apple will eating everyone that comes off the assembly line. OK, So lets say you got one, and lets say the antenna’s will work. Do you really need that kind of throughput? Most of us just don’t have internet connections that could even push 1/2 as much down. Now, if you had your own server to access then you might but that also means your server is setup to offer out that much of a stream. Again, most of us just don’t have RAIDED systems that could do this. Don’t get me wrong here. In the future we will likely have this level of throughput but thats still a good five years away. Bottom-line here save your money upgrading your AirPort board to an ac version.

I would like to know the same answer but for a 2010 MBP 13" C2D 2.4 ghz and an iMac 27" i7 2.93 ghz Looking at ifixit teardown of the iMac yes in a sense they look the same compared to the new 2013 model teardown i hope some one can let us know asap and then were to get the new ac wifi card. i know that the new wifi card has bluetooth 4.0 in it and my model has it separate which i dont really care for the luetooth stuff

The new Airport card (802.11ac Wi-Fi) in MacBook Pro 15" Retina Late 2013 is compatible with MacBook Pro 15" Retina Mid 2012. You can look at under site. http://cafe.naver.com/inmacbook/916510

QuickerTek has the 802.11ac cards for 15" MPR and 13" MBA