No longer works with the 2018 MBPs

[mighty124]

Has anyone ever managed to find a way to spoof MAC addresses on macos for 2018 MBPs? Since it looks like even the manual sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx no longer changes anything... 
 Thanks for the help!

[halo]

Hi thanks for your report!

I only have a MBP 2017 so unfortunately I cannot verify that.

But reports are rolling in over at WifiSpoof that it stopped working on brand new MacBooks. It's a commercial product so they'll try hard to find out what's going on.

You could try the free trial version of wifispoof.com to confirm that it's not working on your MacBook. It would be rather radical if Apple stopped this functionality just like that. 🤔

(Also, please try a few different MAC addresses, also with known Apple vendor prefixes. Because I know that a whole range of addresses won't be accepted whatever you do. But you probably already tried.)

[halo]

More reports, doesn't look good.

[hktalent]

me too

[hktalent]

not work

echo $rtpswd | sudo -S ifconfig en0 ether f0:18:98:bb:aa:22

[madhavajay]

Seems to be working for these guys? https://twitter.com/SweetP_Pro/status/1065139270309085184

[halo]

Hi Madhava, thank you for that link! I'm sure, however, that they refer to "mojave dark mode theme improvements" introduced in their 3.4.3 version.

I believe they still cannot spoof 😌

Quote by SweetP administrator 27 days ago:

It just isn't possible. Apple has disabled the ability to do this. All we can hope is a firmware update to the MacBook Pro re-adding this ability.

Let me also refer again to these guys who are actively trying to triage the issue, without luck though.

[madhavajay]

Ahh yes of course, sorry, I confounded Mojave with MBP 2018. Thats a pity, I just got my MBP 2018 and was pretty disappointed to find LinkLiar doesnt work. :(

I guess this would still work with a third party WiFi Dongle though right?

[halo]

I just got my MBP 2018 and was pretty disappointed to find LinkLiar doesnt work. :(

I'm sorry to hear that. Given that Apple cares a lot for iPhone MAC addresses to be random, I can only hope that this was a mistake on their side. But then again I understand they might want to be the good guys for airport internet providers.

I was afraid this were be a pure hardware limitation, until there was one guy who said it worked with factory-shipped High Sierra, but others said it didn't. So we simply don't know.

It would be great if you could boot your MacBook with another operating system, say, Ubuntu directly from a USB stick and try to change your MAC. If it works, we'd immediately know this is a software blockage, not a hardware issue.

I guess this would still work with a third party WiFi Dongle though right?

Yes, that's what I've read. But just as with everything, some dongles work, some don't. That's up to the dongle vendor, I suppose. I have more luck with USB-A Ethernet dongles than USB-C on a 2017 MBP.

[madhavajay]

I can try, although I heard disabling safe boot is required?

[halo]

Hm, not according to this guide. But I haven't tried.

Maybe you meant when installing Ubuntu on the local disk instead of running it directly from the USB stick?

[Suleman-Elahi]

I read on reddit that in MAC High Sierra change MAC address by ensuring the first three octets of the address stay the same as the hardware address.

XX:XX:XX:YY:YY:YY

Leave XX’s the same as hardware address, change YY’s.

[madhavajay]

That would be awesome if it worked :)

[halo]

As far as I can tell, this works again as of macOS Catalina, regardless of the MacBook production year. I tested it myself on a 2019 MacBook Pro and similar reports have been coming in.

Closing this for now, thank you for reporting this issue.