The best approach would be to listen Bonjour traffic (multicast dns).īy default, machines are called 'jannies-iphone.local', 'gregs-macbook.local', 'peters-imac.local'.īonjour is pretty talkative and generate noise for AFP, SMB, VNC, RAOP, DAAP and other services/protocols. Since you mention monitoring the network traffic, Reply two years after asking, it is not feasible relying only on the Mac address.

Also consider on the Mac end, repairs often give a new MAC address to portables and even desktop Macs when the ethernet controller is replaced. If so, we might have better luck trying to bin the numbers by approximate manufacturing date rather than by where it ends up in a shipping product. It would make sense to dole out parts of each region to factories that are expected to make 5 or 10 thousand devices in the next month and onle issue more once the existing addresses are consumed.

My guess is the addresses are issued sequentially rather than by final destination. I haven't seen a case where a Mac and an iOS device share the same smaller block of MAC addresses, but I can't even rule that out for you based on my experience running networks that log MAC address and are in a position to know what hardware is associated with which MAC address over the years. Perhaps if you can find someone that runs the mobile device management software for a very large company or school district and see if they are curious enough to see if a larger data set would yield some better results for you. It could be that there is some encoding present and no-one has stumbled across which bits are coded with model numbers, but a simple sort of the MAC addresses has the devices all jumbled up. Yes - a string of MacBooks when ordered together will usually have sequential addresses (more so than sequential serial numbers in fact) - but over time, the iMacs seem mixed in with the Airs and the MacBook Pro. Sadly, my data here is in the hundreds and not thousands presently. Looking at the data now, there are no clear patterns to help differentiate between the device types. Over years of watching MAC addresses on networks as well as the explosion of devices on the iOS end of things, if there were a nice pattern, it would start showing in deployments with hundreds of devices.įor example, I have one Mac that has data on about 1,000 iOS devices that have been connected over time to that Mac while iPhone configuration utility was running. No, sorting or determining a pattern in the MAC address isn't a feasible way to map to model of Apple product.

Apple mac address lookup serial number