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Wi-Fi Issues Continue For OS X Users Despite Updates
itwbennett writes: Although Apple has never officially acknowledged issues surrounding Yosemite and Wi-Fi connectivity, the company is clearly aware of the problem: Leading off the improvements offered in the update 10.10.2 update released Tuesday was 'resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect,' according to the release notes. Despite this, Apple's support forum was filled with tales of frustrated users. And Mac owners aren't the only Apple users experiencing wireless connection failures after updating their OS. Wi-Fi connectivity issues have also dogged iOS 8 since Apple released the mobile OS on Sept. 17.
Apple has always had complete shit wireless drivers and chipsets for macbooks. I'm honestly shocked they're acknowledging the issue after it's existed from DAY 1 of the x86 transition.
Users are probably just holding their device incorrectly,
Captcha: Posture
Haven't had any issues here on iOS 8 or Yosemite.
I've got a 2012 Macbook Air running Yosemite. Wireless has been giving me problems on wake. Once it gets connected, it's fine. But just the other day, I woke the laptop up, and no matter what I did it could not see my 5GHz network, despite the fact that a bunch of my other devices could see/connect to it just fine.
I rebooted the Mac and it worked fine... but I shouldn't have to.
thousands of coffee shops around the world were suddenly faced with a mysterious plunge in their electricity bill. Further componding the paradox was a sudden increase in customers willing to pay actual money for some foreign substance known as 'coffee.' Dusting off a curious relic called the 'espresso' machine one employee states, "according to the machine manual im called 'a barista', and this device makes something called espresso?" Puzzled, a cashier chimed in, "no thats not right, we're an ISP you know, like Comcast...thats what we sell isnt it?" Still curious, a manager emerged and asked, "how long have we sold this? its called a biscotti! does anyone remember these?" A customer interviewed expressed marvel in finding that, "This is a coffee shop now! just 3 months ago i think it was an office. everyone had laptops. I guess they moved?"
Good people go to bed earlier.
It might not be Yosemites fault but it co-insides absolutely.
I posted this in another place before, but I will post my personal experience again:
2 weeks ago, I bought a brand new Macbook Pro. During setup, I ran into a bug where the 'next' button disappeared entirely during apple ID "linking", and could not be finished. I had to force re-start the machine, and then skip that step. After setup, it became apparent that Yosemite did not ship with it (why?), so I had to upgrade. However, due to my faulty Apple ID setup the first time, it couldn't use the apple store to do it. I deleted all the iCloud users, and added a new one, but adding one doesn't make it primary (what the fuck?) so I had to delete it and re-add it a different way.
Once I had Yosemite, my WiFi stopped working altogether. You can google about this issue, it's awful. Since there's no hard network jack on the pro, I can't get to the internet at all, which means I can't get a patch even if they release it.
It's pretty terrible.
I have to say that my internet on my MacBook pro still drops once in a while. However it's drastically improved. The biggest thing is that I would have to select the network and re logon every time I woke up the computer. it never did it automatically. Now it does!!
;)
As discussed on this forum
1st World Problems
Maybe this is a good time to complain about my WiFi issues with the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. When it wakes up, I always have to disconnect and reconnect from the access point. When I go between home and work, I expect it to automatically connect to the appropriate access point, but I always have to do it manually
Apparently, these are known issues. I love my Surface Pro 3, but it would be great if this was addressed.
Lazy as usual, I only read the summary. But it looks like there is no connectivity issues. However there appears to be a disconnectivity issue.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
the "broken" state was actually a fix for a much more broken state... unless you want your laptop battery constantly drained while in sleep mode, the wifi antennae is turned off... when you wake up the computer, it used to just assume it was still connected and send out a "hey, i think i'm connected to you" message, which your wifi router would happily acknowledge, and the connection would be instantly available as if the computer never went to sleep. no new logon or auth handshake, just instant access, which is what most users want.... but that opens up rogue wifi hotspots from catching that "hey, i think i'm connected to you" message, and responding with their own "yup, that's me, we're connected" on a slightly more powerful signal which would always beat out the response from the real router, and now you can sniff all of their traffic and steal session cookies. classic airport or coffee shop hack.
so, the "fix" is to require a new auth handshake whenever recovering from sleep mode. that is a good thing. for me, it means i open my laptop and get a "the internet is not available" error if i immediately refresh a web page... but the connection automatically reconnects within about 5 seconds.... that is the kind of thing steve jobs wouldn't have let ship... but the alternative is a massive security hole.
I heard from somewhere that some of the problems were due to AirDrop/AirPlay, since now they support functioning even when you're not connected to the same network. I don't really understand it, but I think it was something to do with bonjour. For example, I can see my neighbor's apple tv's, even though they are not connected to my Wifi network.
All I can think of is Rocky and Bullwinkle: "AGAIN??!"
Mac OS X has had wifi connectivity problems dating back to 2003-2004.
They fix it, then it comes back. Fix it, and it comes back.
Maybe their problem is actually in their version control/system integration area. These guys have been taking the same regression for at least 10 years now.
The problems with "Wi-Fi" are numerous. The end result is that generally speaking, Wi-Fi is a hot mess of broken tech that doesn't work. In the rare case that it DOES work, even the most trivial of changes in the environment or in the client can completely break it.
1. Early versions of the spec were too loosely worded, and allowed for too many "interpretations".
2. Vendor extensions are still a major problem. Many vendor extensions are not compatible with one another, and a device that has a vendor extension enabled
may work very poorly (or not at all) with a device lacking said extension.
3. Actual implementations of Wi-Fi are all over the map in terms of quality, with ridiculous things like: advertising support for an extension that it doesn't actually support; criminally severe bugs in a production implementation; vendors that try to work around bugs that other vendors introduced but in turn create yet more bugs, causing a vicious cycle of workarounds to workarounds; "hide and go seek" with extensions and spec interpretations; ridiculous driver implementations that hold exclusive access over very coarse-grained locks in the OS kernel for long periods of time, causing freezes and/or panics; poorly designed antennas; buggy firmware that never gets updated; etc.
4. The spectrum WiFi uses is open to be used by literally anything else that complies with a few simple rules, such as the maximum Tx power on that frequency band. As a consequence, random electric devices can freely leak a certain amount of random interference (noise) in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi bands, which destroys the ability for WiFi to operate. Ever lose your WiFi when you turn on your vacuum cleaner, or microwave? That's what's happening.
5. The spectrum WiFi uses is used by other communications protocols that are not Wi-Fi. While some effort is made to interoperate between a few of them, such as cooperation between Bluetooth nodes and WiFi nodes (such that they don't "trample over" one another if they use the same frequency), the interoperation protocols, specifications, and implementations have the same problems as the Wi-Fi specs themselves, as stated above.
6. Recent increased focus on power saving has caused some rather extreme power saving techniques to be employed in Wi-Fi firmware and drivers, which sacrifices performance, range and reliability for a few microwatts or milliwatts of energy. Paradoxically, some of the proponents of these techniques actually think that's OK, and are still trying to make the problem worse.
7. There are a large number of complex physical parameters that affect whether two WiFi transceivers will be able to communicate, which 99% of users don't understand at all. The power saving techniques mentioned above reduce the variety of possible configurations (that is, device orientations and distances, mainly) under which the signal will be reliable and high-performance.
8. Vendors that produce Wi-Fi transceivers, or products that integrate them, usually perform inadequate testing to certify the device as interoperable with a very large array of existing and upcoming other products that use Wi-Fi. Especially in the case of smartphones, the possible number of clients and basestations that may be interacted with is tremendous: Smart TVs; DSL modem/routers; cable modem/routers; other smartphones; enterprise APs and repeaters; laptops; tablets; cars; IoT devices -- all these things need to be tested. With a LOT of work -- and I mean a LOT -- eventually a Wi-Fi stack can be designed in such a way that it operates at least decently well with all modern incarnations of the above, but that says nothing about older implementations, which people love to keep around for a decade or more, and expect them to work. A sufficiently general Wi-Fi stack that works okay with all of the above will probably have so many heuristics for bug detection, compromises, polling tests, etc. that they won't work especially well even in an "ideal" scenario, and may even try to implement contradictory rul
It does take it longer (10-15seconds?) to find the 5GHZ radio - but it does. I haven't noticed any drops. May be it is the combination of newer hardware and Yosemite.
This issue: Bonjour over AWDL is still happening on 10.10.2. Wifi download speeds immediately plummet when any service that relies on bonjour activates. You can reproduce this issue by starting a speed test of your choice and clicking anything that requires bonjour. The speed will fall like a rock.
Issuing a:
sudo ifconfig awdl0 down
will immediately restore the connection speed. It's so certain that I've been able to basically play ping pong with the DL speeds by clicking the AirPlay icon to cause it to dive and then dropping the awdl0 connection to bounce it back up. There's also a lingering disconnect problem that seems to infect Apple devices trying to connect or remain connected to WPA 2 (AES) networks although I've not seen this behavior since 10.10.2 arrived, although my testing has been limited.
Just try connecting bluetooth from any mobile device that isn't an iOS one. You'll see how badly bluetooth sucks too.
Further proof that anyone can have a mix of crappy hardware and software cause them problems.
Can I get a loud "Well DUH!" from anyone who's life isn't consumed by rampant brand fanboyism?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
My iPad 2, running iOS 7 gets disconnected in certain WIFIs quite often. ... 10.7 does not even offer a hotkey or a menu to switch desktops. And how to activate multiple desktops, you need to google for. I guess a huge amount of people who never had 10.6 don't even know that 10.7 and later supports multiple (virtual) desktops. ... you can not even insert a clickable link into a text document via the applications API (not sure if that ever worked, though). ... ...
My iPhone running iOS 6 stays in the same network without any problems.
Since Mac OS X 10.5/10.6 and iOS 5/6, more precisely since roughly half a year, perhaps a year, before Steve Jobs death, the quality and usefulness of Apple Software goes downhill rapidly
Support for AppleScript, for Apples own programs, like TextEdit, is down to a bare minimum
My Application lost the ability to search a few days ago, also the intelligent folders (which I rely heavily on in my business) stopped working. A restart of Mail.app changed nothing. I had to reboot.
Backups to time machine, don't work minimum once a week. Error is: (insert computer name) bundle in use. I wonder by whom? Usually I have to reboot the time machine, which you only can do by unplugging it from the power: which is a bad idea for a device/appliance containing a hard drive. (This is all 10.7 on a MacBook Air)
The back ups for my other laptop, running 10.6 got lost half a year ago. Timemachine gave an error: incremental back up not possible, need to make a full backup. Wow, never had I assumed that implies all my old backups are gone.
I could rant for ever
MS I mainly hated because the UI is not useable, and the random bugs that showed up REGULARLY.
Now I start hating Apple, too. At least the UI still works better (for me) than Windows.
Probably it is time to build up my own unix based backup solution and write my own apps for basic stuff like Mail and Web. I can not get it that it is still impossible to freeze a browser tab that is in the background completely
A few tabs open in Chrome and Safari and the laptop just runs 3h instead of the 'normal' 10h.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I would also like to mention this occurs on my Nexus 5 pretty frequently: I'm at home, using the WiFi, and randomly it just stops working. It just says, for every request I put out, that they time out. The only way to "fix" it is to shut off WiFi, and then turn it back on.
This happened on my Galaxy S3 as well. All other devices in the house (Xbox, laptops with the exception of the MacBook Pro which suffers from this Yosemite issue) have no problems.
There are other issues I've had as well as this in other places with Android, but this is the most annoying one.
So much for 'it just works' claims.
I've had quite a lot of issues with Mavericks, though.
Yosemite solved them almost completely.
Almost, because sometimes my 2012 MacMini will randomly disconnect from the WiFi access point (an almost 10 year old Linksys 54MBit AP-only).
Then, I have to disabled WiFi completely, wait a few moments, re-enable it and reconnect to my AP again.
It's very random, which leads me to the conclusion that it could also be an issue with the AP and/or all the wireless networks around me, probably using much later and much "better" technology and basically killing my WiFi.
I don't really blame Apple. There are so many devices out there, so many buggy firmware- and driver-versions, so many buggy OSs and the spectrum is so overloaded these days as everybody and his dog has at least one WiFi AP (sometimes several, via a mesh-setup or a simple repeater (adding to the problem inadvertently...). I sometimes wonder why works at all.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I have read people's complaints about this, and I know it's happening and is very vexing. But I haven't had any trouble with wi-fi on my Macs - either at home (a couple MacBook Pros and several iDevices, connecting to an Airport Extreme base) or at work (iDevices connecting to whatever enterprise gear U of Wash. has - well, except that UW's wifi is universally oversubscribed). And over the past decade or so, I've been much happier with OS X's wifi performance than I ever was with XP's.
I would assume people have investigated whether there's some commonality between the complaints and the base station chipsets / manufacturers involved... (yeah, yeah, I know - RTFA)
#DeleteChrome
Out of curiosity, i have run OS X Snow Leopard, Mavericks, and Yosemite and i still don't get the hype, in virtualbox of course. The sad thing is xubuntu, ubuntu, mint, opensuse, federa actually run a lot better than OS X even with my wi fi setup. Why are people spending $$$ on Apple?
I had an old Linksys router with a Netgear access point. When my wife upgraded her Mac laptop to 10.10, she started complaining about the WiFi. Every time she woke the laptop up, it would take 5-10 minutes to get WiFi connection to the internet. I replaced the access point with a new access point, but it made no difference. She installed the first update that was suppose to fix WiFi problems, but it did not help. She also has a iMac desktop that uses WiFi, but she did not upgrade the OS on it and it was not having the problems her Laptop did. None of the PC, iPhones, iPads, TV, ... that use WiFi had any problems either.
From what I could tell watching the laptop, looking at logs and diagnostics, the laptop was connecting to the WiFi fine, but it took 5-10 minutes to get an IP address from the DHCP server in the router. I replaced the router with a new Apple Airport router, and the problem with laptop was magically fixed, even when using the Netgear access point. Netgear access point has a wired connection to Airport and is running on a different channels so they do not interfere with each other.
The old Linksys router did not support IPv6, while the new Airport does. Some of these WiFI issues could be compatibility issues with older routers and DHCP servers.
I am on the iOS dev program and get the betas. I had no wifi problems with the betas of ios 8 on my devices, but once it went GM my devices started randomly not tx/rx ing even though they had ips and were connected to the wifi. Now, with 8.1.3 my iPad 3 is sucking down battery like the dickens and my iPhone 5s is still dropping tx/rx as of about an hour ago. The iPhone issue is fixed by disconnecting and reconnecting, taking only seconds but still annoying.
No problems with wifi, although I am mostly on wired connections with my rMBP. I don't trust wifi for my actual computing work, plus it's slower.
I think Apple's unwillingness to admit their bugs, dishonest reviewers and apple's fanboys happily squashing all discontent on message boards etc. combined creating a situation when people simply refuse to upgrade/patch their apple gear.
I mean look, when I first upgraded my perfectly nice iPad Air to iOS 8, it's Wi-Fi become practically unusable (had to reconnect every 5 minutes). Rendering iPad useless for several weeks. And it's not like I didn't check online reviews beforehand... None of them (sellouts!) mentioned this shit. Only _after_ I knew what's wrong with the update I was able to find those huge message board threads full of pissed-off users wenting.
Now, with the new update for iOS 8 I'm sitting this one out. Or at least waiting until other people upgraded and google got the message indexed so I can find it...
you should see the piece of crap driver osx has/had (switched to windows 4 years ago) for my EDIMAX usb wifi "mac compatible" card...
It strange to see this as my non apple hardware does not appear to be having this issue.
iMac and Macbook on Mac OS10.10
iPhone on iOS 8
Apple TV
Time Capsule router
Airfoil streaming to 5 Airplay receivers
iMac streaming HD video to AppleTV extended desktop
Heavy upload and download of high res print files all day.
Zero slowdowns, zero disconnects, wake from sleep works perfectly.
They all just work perfectly/
I have gone through 3 iPhones 4S. Every time the same situation, the wifi option completely disappears (greyed out), and no amount of network reset etc. can bring it back. It is a well known problem with people getting temporary fixes by freezing/heating the device! It does not seem to be just a hardware problem (e.g. like the nVidia soldering), but has to do with firmware as well, since this started happening with the introduction of iOS 6 or 7 (I forget) which added some temperature control functionality.
So your wifi dies completely. It is so widespread and discussed (google for it) that for any other brand this would have probably been a class action lawsuit - or at least an acknowledgement and free fix, but with Apple every time it fails I have to pay out of pocket (it is for development purposes, no I am not a masochist), since the vast majority of Apple users are fine with paying.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Definitely the best of the Xs...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Update fixed my issues at work. Wi-Fi would connect and disconnect a couple of times a minute, but only at work. Never experienced it anywhere else. Update has eliminated the issue for me. Wonder what the common denominator is for other's issues.
Of course, the ship machines (macbook air) that no longer have ethernet ports without buying a converter. The justification( I suppose) is that you will naturally connect to the network via wireless...whoops, I guess we dont know how to support stable wifi in our OS...The urge to self-destruction is a powerful urge and it lurks in the heart of apple. Simply declare that we are dependent on this critical service and you can be sure that those responsible for that service will destroy it. The facts seem to be that all those who really understood the fundamental underpinnings of OSX, probably left the company years ago...
my 1000 dollar ASUS all aluminum n550 with intel ac card works flawlessly under windows 8.1.
Not exactly "just works" though is it?
So basically, you said that Apple haven't acknowledged the problem, then quoted them acknowledging the problem?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I've had problems every time I upgrade my laptop with the WEP key stored in the key chain getting messed up somehow. Took a huge amount of poking around to figure out what was going on, because the error handling was atrocious (Unix programmers take note). It didn't report anywhere that it couldn't retrieve the WEP key, it just failed to make a connection with no clue as to why. Of course, because there was no problem indication from the software and no official information from Apple on the problem (probably because they had no clue along with everybody else), there were literally hundreds of incorrect theories out there on the Internet as to what might fix it. And, of course, these dominate the Google search making it take days to find somebody who actually know what they were talking about.
In this case, the fix is trivial: Delete the WEP key with the keychain tools and let it ask again.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
My 2013 MacBook Air periodically "swops" networks. I've an AP downstairs and another upstairs. At times, my MacBook connects spontaneously to the other AP (upstairs if I'm downstairs and vice versa). It's annoying because generally the signal strength is poorer.
I just had to power cycle my iPhone 6 this night due to Wi-Fi not working. Solid connection with full signal strength, not a single bit going anywhere. Same thing happens with cellular data as well when I go to work. It doesn't seem to cope well with going between open and guest Wi-Fi networks and outside vs inside repeater cellular data networks. I don't know if it is a hardware problem or software problem but so far this has been the worst phone I have ever owned, even worse than fliphones, Blackberrys and Windows Mobile devices.