[alexpotato]

I believe Macintoshes "remember" the most recent IP they were given on a network rather than always doing a DHCP.

It's one of the reasons given for why people say Macs "feel better" e.g. you sit down in a room with a friend who has a Dell. Your Mac gets WiFi almost immediately while they have to wait a few seconds even though both of you have been on this network before.

One of the benefits of owning the stack all the way from bare metal to OS to applications.

[jethro_tell]

Except that it breaks other people in busy networks.

Fuck everyone else my WiFi feels good.

[mschuster91]

IIRC it keeps the IP address for as long as the DHCP lease is valid, whereas Windows will do a full DHCP request on every reconnect. That's perfectly valid behavior, and DHCP servers should not delete reservations before the lease expires - which doesn't stop some particularly shoddy implementations from doing so. Cheap SOHO routers tend to not persist leases on the flash to not use up NAND rewrite cycles, so they reset everything upon reboot.