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.

Comments

No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:No shit

[Grishnakh]

I wonder if these are Broadcom chips, with the driver code actually being supplied by Broadcom. Broadcom drivers are shit.

Re:No shit

[ogdenk]

Yeah, I was definitely more impressed with the 802.11 chipsets and gear they used in the PPC PowerBooks and iBooks. My older 2009 Macbook doesn't seem to have as many issues as my newer Air does though.

Re:No shit

[Grishnakh]

I've worked with the Broadcom driver source code; it's crap. It doesn't surprise me they're having problems. What's funny is (now that I think about it and remember this from a prior job) Apple is easily Broadcom's biggest wifi customer; you'd think they could do a better job with their software for them, but apparently not.

Re:No shit

[Grishnakh]

There's also code besides the driver code; the Broadcom chips themselves have CPU cores (not sure what kind exactly) running their own firmware, which of course is loaded by the driver. This code is completely closed-source and secret. (The driver code is partially open; you can see their open-source Linux code in the kernel tree; it's "brcmfmac" and "brcmsmac")

I wonder if Apple's recent updates updated the firmware blobs for the Broadcom chips? This could also explain the problems.

Re:No shit

[xeoron]

I found resetting the NVRAM fixing the problem. The process: 1) Shut down your Mac. 2) Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. 3) Turn on your Mac. 4) Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys immediately after you hear the startup sound. 5) Hold these keys until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for a second time. 6) Release the keys.

Re:No shit

[Jesus_666]

I just tried that and imagine my surprise when my MBP spontaneously downgraded itself to Mountain Lion!

Okay, actually it just booted into the old Mountain Lion volume on the first HDD because the Mac keeps the preferred boot volume in NVRAM. So when clearing your NVRAM keep in mind that the Mac will boot into whatever system volume it finds first unless you tell it otherwise.

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

This must be that part of 'Apple just works' stuff I read about.

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I found resetting the NVRAM fixing the problem. The process: 1) Shut down your Mac. 2) Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. 3) Turn on your Mac. 4) Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys immediately after you hear the startup sound. 5) Hold these keys until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for a second time. 6) Release the keys.

Ah yes the voodoo fix that never fixes anything.

Re:No shit

[AaronW]

Several years ago I worked at Atheros working on improving their Linux driver performance for wireless access points. One of my tasks was to figure out why OS X was quite a bit faster than Linux and Windows. I tracked it down to the way OSX sends TCP ACK packets. Both Linux and Windows send a TCP ACK after every other packet whereas OS X would start to space the ACKs out if the connection was reliable. This had a significant impact with 802.11N where there is a lot of packet aggregation. I discovered that OS X would start spacing the ACKs out to every 16-32 TCP packets instead of every other packet. I wish Linux would do something similar.

I can't comment on any other drivers or current OS X since this was a bit over four years ago.

I can think of a couple of things that would improve Linux for wireless. First of all, spacing out the ACKs like OS X would help. Second of all, supporting transmitting a group of packets at a time, especially to a particular destination, would help a lot. This is due to the way 802.11N aggregates a lot of packets together into a single wireless packet based on the next wireless hop destination. It's much more efficient for cache utilization and for the code paths when groups of packets are handled rather than individual packets since there is a lot of queueing and dequeeuing going on inside the driver.

Re:No shit

[AaronW]

I tried dealing with the Broadcom driver on my laptop and had to give up in disgust trying to get it to compile. I upgraded OpenSUSE which included a pre-compiled driver which seems to work for the most part. Broadcom historically has not been very open source friendly. At least one of the Broadcom 10G PHY drivers in the Linux kernel was written by my employer, now a competitor to Broadcom. (see drivers/net/phy/bcm87xx.c for example).

Re:No shit

[perryizgr8]

Even bluetooth is shit in Macbook Pro.

Re:No shit

[GNious]

Wouldn't know - haven't really gotten it to work.

Re:No shit

[perryizgr8]

I have used it with a JBL Flip speaker and the range is literally 2 meters. With my phone I can run around the whole apartment and the music keeps on playing.

Re: No shit

[Migity]

Sounds like Nagle's algotrithm has popped it's head up again. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Re:No shit

[shakezula]

This is my experience too...my 2007 MacBook Pro seldom had (past tense, it finally died last year) issues with any Wifi points. My 2011 MacBook Air though, seems to have issues every time the OSX updates to a newer point release. Mountain Lion was the worst of these upgrades--the Air wouldn't stay connected to my home router (WRT54G) reliably at all. I ended up replacing that router with a Netgear 300N and the connection improved greatly until Mavericks came along and it started all over again. Interestingly, my 2012 iMac has never had any issues with either router or any OSX updates...

Re:No shit

[Grishnakh]

I wonder how much of this is a lack of decent alternatives which are well-marketed, versus simple cultlike behavior.

Think about it: if you want a PC-like computer, what are your choices? There's Apple which is well-marketed and attractive and shiny (but has downsides which aren't as obvious unless you're really familiar with the industry), there's Microsoft-driven PCs where you have to use shitty Windows and deal with all its annoyances, and there's Linux where there's pretty much no one actually pre-installing it and marketing it to consumers (plus there's a ton of different graphical environments, and the two most publicized ones are radical departures from Windows/Mac and have a lot of usability issues, and the one which is a great fit for Windows converts is simply ignored by the Linux community for some reason).

Maybe if there were another company making PCs with an attractive, stable OS which was very usable and could market it decently, we'd be seeing more people abandoning Apple.

This analysis of course is for PCs, not mobile devices. But over there the situation isn't much better; there's Android which has huge marketshare but still you have to deal with a complete lack of support after you buy the device, and then there's Windows Phone which is tainted by everyone's memory of Windows and MS problems. But still, Apple has lost a lot of marketshare in the phone market (though some of that is simply due to the market expanding, and Apple not aiming at the lower end).

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X and iOS both forge QoS packets fooling access points into giving apple devices on the network more bandwidth than all other devices. A single apple user can cripple a network. Don't believe me? Fire up wireshark and do some promiscuous captures to see it in action.

Re:No shit

[tibit]

They also really dropped the ball on USB 2 throughput on some combinations of modern OS X (like Mavericks) with old hardware (say a 2007 MacBook Pro). There are serious throughput problems with some peripheral devices. A workaround is to run Snow Leopard or Windows 7 on the same hardware. This was the last straw that forced me to upgrade my trusty '07 MBP.

Re:No shit

[JewGold]

>Ah yes the voodoo fix that never fixes anything.

Funny how this is prescribed for every ill the mac faces. Usually it's the act of rebooting that "fixes" whatever the problem is. I don't think the command-PR bit does anything, wouldn't be surprised if the action was just mapped to repeatStartupSound() in the bios.

Re:No shit

[Aaden42]

It *does* something, but it seldom actually *fixes* anything. It’s roughly the equivalent of resetting a PC’s BIOS to factory defaults, except that Apple stores quite a bit more in the NVRAM than CPU multiplier & such that BIOS usually does. Preferences about display ordering (which is “primary”), boot device, and no doubt settings related to finding preferred networks for the recovery partition and FindMyMac to do their thing.

I have an older MacBook Pro that’s had WiFi issues in Yosemite, but I haven’t tried zapping the PRAM (as it was called in old-world PPC-based Macs & is where the P-R in the key chord comes from). It’s voodoo in probably 90% of cases, but it helps with some things.

Re:No shit

[Aaden42]

Ahhh! Good old Atheros (and Orinoco before them...)

My 2009 MBP has a Broadcom chip, and it’s had WiFi issues (against an Apple Airport no less) since Yosemite. Haven’t noticed it happening since putting 10.10.2 on, but it’s hardly been long enough for a conclusive “fix.”

Re: No shit

[AaronW]

Sort of. Nagle's algorithm deals with the data, not the ACKs. Basically what is needed is Nagle's algorithm applied to TCP ACK packets which is what Apple is doing.

Probably just holding it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Users are probably just holding their device incorrectly,

Captcha: Posture

Re:Probably just holding it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Any self-respecting straight man who owns an Apple likely doesn't have much of a device to begin with.

Re:Probably just holding it wrong

[djrobxx]

Alternate option would be that people with issues aren't using official Apple® AirPort® Extreme® wireless stations.

Nope. I can say first hand the issue happens with an Apple® Time Capsule®. Issue started with Yosemite. The wifi randomly (but infrequently) decides to disconnect and just stays idle with a grayed out signal indicator. It reconnects fine if you just click on the network from the list, but at the VERY least, OSX should try to search for, and connect to known wifi networks when the current one becomes disconnected. It doesn't do that, it seems like the whole process for managing the wifi connection just falls asleep.

Re:Probably just holding it wrong

[mspohr]

My Macbook Air 2010 worked fine with wifi until I "upgraded" to Yosemite... since then very flaky wifi... spontaneous disconnects, only connects on wake about half the time. I've tried a lot of the "fixes" on the forums and still have problems. Most of the time I have to reboot to get it to connect reliably (until it goes to sleep).
Yosemite also features a crappy UI and Spotlight has lost much of its usefulness. Apple's software is going down hill fast. No more "upgrades" for me.

Re:Probably just holding it wrong

[uniquegeek]

Really? How about the wifi clients follow the RFCs? If it needs its own proprietary AP in order to function properly, then it should shouldn't have the label "Wifi-capable" slapped on it.

No issues here

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't had any issues here on iOS 8 or Yosemite.

Re:No issues here

[oodaloop]

I guess Apple can close the trouble ticket now. Thanks!

Re:No issues here

[pecosdave]

Using Ubuntu and Android do cause that to happen.

Re:No issues here

[Lord Flipper]

Haven't had any issues here on iOS 8 or Yosemite.

Same here. Two MBPs (one running a selection of VPNs), and an iMac in the g-friend's office upstairs, zero connection issues. Latest Yosemite on the boxes, latest iOS 8 on phones (okay, 8.1.3 on hers, 8.1.2 on my jailbreak).

It seems like a lot of guys are using cheapo routers. Who knows?

As for bluetooth, it's a cheap-assed protocol, with very shitty bandwidth for audio. Invented on Win95 maybe?

Re:No issues here

[Lord Flipper]

I guess Apple can close the trouble ticket now. Thanks!

Soon as we get done filling out this latest $18 Billion deposit slip, your almost-certainly user-generated "issue" is next! Thanks for your patience!

in an unrelated news event

[nimbius]

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?"

Re:in an unrelated news event

[d34thm0nk3y]

its called a biscotti! does anyone remember these?"

Have Mike throw them out. They've all gone hard.

Re:in an unrelated news event

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a biscotto. The plural is "biscotti."

Anecdotal Example

[iONiUM]

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.

Re:Anecdotal Example

[SuperKendall]

Not that it should be needed, but you can buy an Thunderbolt to Ethernet adaptor... I bought one just in case as you never know when traveling what networking will be like.

Re:Anecdotal Example

[azav]

But Ive had them redo the UI with completely eye burning colors on all white, so you have that which is nice. Or not.

I can't upgrade to the new OS. It's just too ugly and too many moving visual distractions that I can't turn off.

Re:Anecdotal Example

[Dixie_Flatline]

If they do patch it, I greatly suspect that if you bring your laptop into an Apple store, they'll do an upgrade/patch/swap for you there.

Still, this is pretty much garbage. I haven't had these problems, but my iMac and Mac Mini aren't the most cutting edge hardware. I wonder what combination of hardware and software is causing issues here.

Re:Anecdotal Example

[ilsaloving]

That's bizarre... How in the world does something like that happen?

Of course, as a general rule I don't apply an Apple ID to the initial user of the machine, because I save that to serve as an emergency admin user, so that's probably why I haven't noticed.

You wouldn't happen to know the specific version of yosemite your machine came with? (Guessing 10.10.1?)

Thanks for sharing.

Re:Anecdotal Example

[epyT-R]

They should include ethernet ports right into the machine like they used to. Fuck this ultra thin shit..

Re:Anecdotal Example

[dgatwood]

Would be nice. I also wish they'd go back to the pre-retina enclosure, and instead of wasting space on an optical drive, I'd like to see them use most of that extra space for additional battery capacity. If I run Photoshop or Finale or Xcode or any of the other software that I use to actually get stuff done with my retina MBP (about one year old), I'm lucky to get 2.5 to 3.5 hours out of it. If I were designing a computer to meet my needs, the "four cores running at full tilt" duration would be eight or ten hours, and the "just wasting time doing light-duty web browsing" number would be measured in days.

Or just bring back removable batteries. Either way.

won't automatically connect to WiFi

[slackoon]

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 ;)

Re:Surface Pro 3 (off-topic, mostly)

[hcs_$reboot]

Mostly?

much better than before either way

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yup.

[Dynedain]

Anecdotal - I have a 2012 MBPro (Retina) and have no problem sleeping and rejoining 5GHz APs on wake

"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[allquixotic]

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

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[swb]

I would add:

9. Entities like cities rolling out "city-wide" Wi-Fi and filling the available spectrum with background noise which reduces performance of local Wi-Fi.

10. Organizations that treat Wi-Fi spectrum as something they "own" within a multi-tenant building and making attempts to kill off uses they don't control or profit from.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[drinkypoo]

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.

Oddly, I find Wi-Fi to be the only wireless technology which does work reliably. Bluetooth? It's pure bollocks, it never works. Well, that is, when you're trying to do anything the least bit fiddly. And they permitted all kinds of things which abuse the shit out of the spec to call themselves bluetooth, like PS3 controllers. And my problems with cellular technology are legion. But Wi-Fi tends to just keep on ticking along for me. Routers, those shit themselves, but completely and not just the Wi-Fi.

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.

You can have all the same equivalent problems with normal Ethernet, though. Many vendors still sell ordinary 100bTX(etc) chipsets which are total garbage, and people still buy NICs using them and stick them into their machines. I have a whole raft of sketchy tulip clones here because they were $1/ea some years ago at Fry's, back when that was still a really amazing price and not just what you'd expect on eBay. They work OK if you only put one of them in a system, which pretty much crapped on my plans for them, but over the years they've occasionally come in handy. Problem is, PCI is goin' away...

The spectrum WiFi uses is open to be used by literally anything else that complies with a few simple rules, [...] Ever lose your WiFi when you turn on your vacuum cleaner, or microwave? That's what's happening.

Well no. My vacuum and microwave are both brand-name products which seem to have adequate shielding, they do not seem to negatively impact my 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi in the least. In case you're wondering, the vac is a Dyson.

If USB and its "device class" specifications (Mass Storage, Battery charging spec, RNDIS, audio class, etc.) is a ringing success story of how standardization can promote interoperability,

It isn't. Most devices don't use the generic driver, even when it would be better than whatever they actually did.

What sucks about Wi-Fi is that when you have a lot of networks near one another, they crap on one another harder than they are supposed to. It takes extra-special care to make this not happen, and then any dillhole who brings his own battery-powered AP with him can still totally hose your network. But otherwise it mostly works, and often better than the other stuff that's supposed to be better. I had way less radio-related problems when my WISP used Wi-Fi than I do now that they're using some custom CDMA crap. No weather problems either, even though I'm more than five miles from the site. It proves nothing of course, except that the Wi-Fi is more mature technology than whatever they were using.

Now, I have yet to try Chromecast, Miracast etc. but I'm starting to think harder about that, so maybe I will finally learn to hate Wi-Fi. But in general, the only real hardship I've had is with chipsets whose drivers don't support master mode under Linux. This taught me to buy intel and Atheros. Even then you don't get a guarantee, but odds are great and you can always check ahead of time. The thing is, that's good advice anyway, both what to buy and what to do before you buy.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Say all you want about WiFi standards being a mess but I've never had these kinds of wireless issues with Windows. The current MacBook Pro I have, which was purchased in late 2013 and came perinstalled with Mavericks, has been trouble-free. So far. However, the previous MBP I owned, which was purchased in late 2008 and came preinstalled with Leopard, was a nightmare. Every now and then, the machine would forget how to connect to my wireless router and it would take hours of trying many things (I never could nail down exactly what action I took to resolve the issue) to get it to reconnect to the wireless router. In the meantime, the various Windows computers I had connected to the same wireless router without trouble and they never, ever forgot how to connect.

There's elements of OS X that are just a bunch of awful hacks and results in a fragile OS. On the 2013 MBP, I've been able to crash the OS by scrolling in Chrome or using VLC. Some year ago, I saw the source code (knew the developer) for a subsystem that got incorporated into OS X. I could not believe such a horrible ball of code could be put into a commercial product.

With Microsoft, I get the impression that a lot of the code is home-grown (perhaps due to not-invented-here syndome as well embrace-extend-extinguish strategy) but having had to develop the code themselves and having invested the R&D, a lot of Windows functionality is quite a bit more stable than OS X. It seems Apple is content to take open source software, compile, and then ship it without any sort of testing or R&D to improve it. Bigger profits, I guess, but I haven't seen a crash in Windows (bad third party drivers don't count) since 1997 when I first switched to Windows NT.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[AmiMoJo]

Excuses, excuses. I don't want to call you a fanboy, but this is a classic fanboy tactic. Blame the technology, make out it is so badly broken it's the technology's fault and not Apple's.

The reality is that hundreds of millions of people use wifi successfully and with minimal hassle every day. Yeah, it's not perfect but 20 years ago widespread low cost networking was just a dream, and now we have thousands and thousands of devices sharing the 2.4GHz band more or less without issue. If anything it's biggest problem is that it's too popular and has saturated 2.4GHz.

To look at it another way, all other major operating systems managed to implement it in a fairly reliable way. I come home, my phone and laptop connect to wifi automatically and just work, despite the congestion and mix of standards and vendors.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron, plain and simple.

Wifi works great, I have a 7 node cisco network with hundreds of clients connect in a RF noisy machine shop environment. No issues... but it's all Android and Windows.

Just because you buy shitty $10 WAPs from Frys doesn't mean the technology is bad, it means you're a moron for wasting your money.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[skids]

On top of all this, Apple WiFi is especially broken because:

1) The station will never hop to the best AP when it should, it always waits until signal drops to -75dBm before roaming, so it continues to use the AP at the door where you walked in the building,. not the one near where you are sitting, ruining WiFi for everyone with low-rate shouting. Apple thinks we are going to carefully tweak our networks around this weakness (this is their stated offcial position on the matter) and they are wrong.

2) Responding to a bluetooth beacon from various Apple gadgets, the Apples will try to subvert the local WiFi network and communicate directly on channel 149. They won't even try the local network first to see if it is usable, instead they will try to multiplex the radio hardware between 149 and whatever other channel is actually being used. Meanwhile they fire up a radio on chanel 149, which is a common primary channel for bonded 40/80 channel groups, no matter what else is around trying to use it. Apple thinks we are going to hobble our 40MHz/non-DFS and 80Mhz/DFS channel bonding plan by taking all the APs off 149 (also their official position.) They are wrong.

3) Apple cannot manage to get their autodiscovery protocols to shut up long enough to let wifi and bluetooth hardware settle into a usable state. They think having their devices constantly scanning for gadgets is a terrific idea. They are wrong.

4) Apple keeps removing control over the WiFi from the users, preventing them from properly configuring their chipsets for a particular network, or even locking to a specific AP or turn off a band to help network admins troubleshoot a problem. Every new version of the OS, more options for control of the WiFi disappear from the UI. They think every network operator is going to provide .mobileconfig files to set these options. They are wrong.

5) For years, Apple has stubbornly refused to implement and support OKC. They think that because their iPads now support 11k this is no longer a problem and we will all just enable 11k even though it will break a bunch of other legacy devices (including iPads too old to run 11k) which still account for a large percentage of our users. They are wrong. And also they won't say whether they ever plan to support 11k on the OSX side.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[swb]

If anything it's biggest problem is that it's too popular and has saturated 2.4GHz.

It kind of makes you wonder what the problems would be like if there was another 2-300 Mhz of bandwidth available -- ie, if all the issues are ultimately caused by limited RF space and the many kludges and speedups applied to overcome this.

Part of me thinks if the standards bodies would refuse extensions that attempt to go faster by using wider channels or channel bonding (thus maintaining a larger number of unused channels), it would be useful.

But the cynic in believes it would just be an arms race by vendors to bypass the standards bodies to come up with new ways to bond channels for "ZOMG! Megabitz!" advertised performance and do all kinds of stupid things in an attempt to hoard RF space for performance even if most devices wouldn't use it.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[allquixotic]

Considering I have never spent a penny on any Apple product or service, and have no stock invested in Apple, I'm not sure how the label "fanboy" makes any sense whatsoever.

Just because *you've* not had any particular problem doesn't mean that problems don't exist. I have the unfortunate pleasure of having a reputation as a person who is knowledgable in general about computing, so pretty much everyone I know who isn't technically savvy themselves will invariably come to me when they have problems.

I've had to deal with a small handful of old laptop HDD crashes, USB port failures, botched Firefox updates, malware, etc. in my years of being unable to say "no" to a desperate user who needs my help to fix their shit. But I can count the number of these instances on one hand per incident type.

On the other hand, I have responded to maybe 100 different requests that go along the lines of "my WiFi won't connect" or "my WiFi is slower than dial-up" or "my WiFi keeps dropping out". Sometimes these instances involve Apple devices; sometimes not. Often times, they involve devices from different manufacturers. Very often, they involve people who live in tight spaces like apartments or dorms, where WiFi from next door (and downstairs, and upstairs...) can pollute the WiFi spectrum within your own dwelling.

Maybe I'm just really unlucky and I have friends who make poor choices in their purchase of WiFi-using devices, but the disproportionate ratio of WiFi-related problems to non-WiFi problems suggests to me that there are metric tons of devices out there with broken WiFi implementations.

The reputation and legacy of WiFi as a protocol will be judged by whether it could be implemented reliably and consistently, so don't say "that's not a critique on WiFi itself". If even a significant minority (say, 30%) of the implementors can't be arsed to do it *properly* in such a way that you don't get pathetic issues like a link that's capped at 2.8 kbit/s, that should say a lot about the spec, the standards organization, and the verification & validation (or lack thereof) surrounding WiFi.

And while we're on about anecdotal personal evidence, I've got a Note 4 and a current-generation Linksys USB adapter that both claim to speak 5 GHz 802.11ac, and I get random dropouts when the devices are within 10 feet of one another and not being moved.

I randomly fire up a wifi heat map on my phone when I get the dropouts, and not a single other device in the area is talking on 5 GHz. I don't own a cordless telephone and there are no other dwellings near enough that a cordless phone could be the problem. 2.4 GHz, while noisier, exhibits the same problem. I've tried with 3 different driver releases too, and the problem persisted after a Note 4 OTA claiming to fix WiFi issues.

Then again, my personal experience is just one data point. There's no way I'd claim that to be any kind of a representative sample. I've got a few dozen friends/colleagues/associates -- technically savvy and otherwise -- who would be eager to tell you about their (sometimes ongoing, sometimes former) WiFi woes.

Re:"Wi-Fi" is fundamentally broken, period.

[AmiMoJo]

Just because *you've* not had any particular problem doesn't mean that problems don't exist.

Sure,but just because *you've* had problems doesn't mean it is fundamentally broken. Clearly it works fine for millions of people, the majority in fact. The main issue people have is congestion, i.e. it works too well and became more popular than ever anticipated.

MBP 13 mid-2010 no wifi problems

[perlface]

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.

Bonjour over AWDL

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Same on iOS 7

[angel'o'sphere]

My iPad 2, running iOS 7 gets disconnected in certain WIFIs quite often.
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 ... 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.
Support for AppleScript, for Apples own programs, like TextEdit, is down to a bare minimum ... you can not even insert a clickable link into a text document via the applications API (not sure if that ever worked, though).
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.

Re:Surface Pro 3 (off-topic, mostly)

[RoccamOccam]

Well, both this and the submitted article are about WiFi issues (surprisingly) on big-name platforms. Just different platforms.

Android too

[iONiUM]

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.

Not for me

[rainer_d]

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.

Re:Not for me

[drinkypoo]

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,

If an AP your NIC is not connected to is causing your NIC problems other than low signal or perhaps low throughput, then your NIC is at fault. OTOH, if your router (AP, whatever) is actually causing you problems, then yes, your NIC deserves a pass. However, IME most of the time if a Linksys router has a problem, it's usually hanging. YMMV, I suppose.

I sometimes wonder why works at all.

Most of the hardware designed before most of the problems were solved is now gone, or at least sitting in a drawer someplace. Sure, I own devices invented before WPA2, but I don't actually use them.

Funny thing is

[93 Escort Wagon]

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)

Re:Funny thing is

[WillAffleckUW]

same here at the UW. It's kind of irritating, since we are building new tech for everyone, but our own internal stuff sucks so bad.

And then I connect to the 100 Gbps port directly and ... what problems?

Re:Yup.

[Dynedain]

I neglected the important part - I've upgraded to Yosemite as well but have had no issues.

it's hard to find trustworthy reviewers these days

[sshir]

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...

osx wifi drivers

[issicus]

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...

No Problems with my Hackinosh....

[who_stole_my_kidneys]

It strange to see this as my non apple hardware does not appear to be having this issue.

Re:Yup.

[rthille]

Did you try turning off/on the wireless? That sometimes works for me when I've got wifi issues. I think it may unload/reload the driver.

Even worse with iPhones 4/4S

[Ecuador]

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.

Snow Leopard Forever!

[beaverdownunder]

Definitely the best of the Xs...

Re:Yup.

[Guspaz]

I did try that the most recent time, it didn't help. It could see the 2.4GHz wireless network, but not the 5GHz wireless network (both networks are broadcast from the same router).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: Not a big problem here...

[cyber-vandal]

Not exactly "just works" though is it?

Re:Problem may be with router too

[ruir]

Nah, not that. Same problem here, it could take 1-2 minutes to get wifi in Mac hardware. The thing is the new Airport supports 5GHz. Note that I routinely disable IP v6 in my Macs just in case.

Nothing New

[herbierobinson]

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.