To discover and communicate with advertised services, the T2 exposes itself to macOS as a network interface, assigned as en6 on our lab machines. This macOS interface is configured for IPv6 with a universally static local address of fe80::aede:48ff:fe00:1122. The T2 exposes itself at a fixed IPv6 address of fe80::aede:48ff:fe33:4455.

MacOS and the T2 communicate over a typical network stack, with a few notable exceptions. Ethernet frames are encapsulated within Mobile Broadband Interface Model (MBIM) packets for transmission over what we can therefore infer is a USB-based interface. For simple application-level messages, one MBIM frame will typically contain a single message, but for larger data transfers, multiple Ethernet frames will be encapsulated within each packet. This is somewhat ironic, as often a data transfer segment will be split into MTU-sized chunks at the TCP layer, only to be combined into a single packet at the MBIM layer.

Above the TCP/IP layer, macOS and the T2 use the HTTP/2 protocol to open, and often maintain, persistent connections between different applications