Katie MarsalOwners of Apple's 13-inch notebooks are reporting that their Wi-Fi access is much less reliable after installing Mac OS X Leopard or more recent updates to Mac OS X Tiger, especially when the systems switch to battery power.
The exact behavior of affected systems can vary slightly, but appears to largely be connected to the computer's power supply. While the connection remains largely stable when plugged into an AC adapter, switching to battery power renders the wireless link intermittent and in many cases drops network access entirely when idle.
"Whenever I unplug my AC adapter, my wireless Internet goes a little crazy and starts continually disconnecting and reconnecting moments later," says one owner.
Users often can't detect nearby networks after restarting the card through software, but can almost always regain a dependable connection after reattaching the power plug. A handful of owners report having to restart the computer to restore the Wi-Fi connection, however.
To date, the intermittent connection issue has not been publicly acknowledged by Apple and affects systems regardless of subsequent Mac OS X updates. Both the recent 10.4.11 update and all current versions of Leopard continue to exhibit the symptoms of the problem, although some note the situation improving for their systems after the most recent upgrades to both Leopard and Tiger.
For those still affected, successful workarounds have included reverting to Mac OS X 10.4.9 when possible, and setting up commands in Terminal that send out data to keep the connection active. But since the issue does not occur when running Windows XP or Vista in Boot Camp, several users say Apple has no reason to leave the apparent flaw unresolved.
"Wi-Fi works OK under other OS X releases and also with Windows Vista running on the MacBook hardware," says one report. "Apple's engineers need to quit playing with their iPhones, roll up their sleeves and look for bugs."
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56 Comments
Very interesting! I bought a MacBook in late September with Tiger 10.4.10 on it. Right from the day, wireless has been troublesome! I do not run Windows on this, but also have a Thinkpad running Vista. When placed side-by-side, the Thinkpad will maintain strong signal averaging 75-85% whereas the MacBook will connect and reconnect often, particularly when on battery power or when resuming! Upgrading to 10.4.11 does not seem to fix the issue - I can detect no increase (or decrease) in stability of the wireless connection.
I hope Apple rolls out a patch for this issue soon...
Owners of Apple's 13-inch notebooks are reporting that their Wi-Fi access is much less reliable after installing Mac OS X Leopard or more recent updates to Mac OS X Tiger, especially when the systems switch to battery power.
System users in Apple's discussion forums (one, two), as well as those speaking directly with AppleInsider, say the problem first surfaced after the appearance of the Mac OS X 10.4.10 update this summer and so far is known to affect most models, though reports are currently scarce from buyers of Apple's fall 2007 units.
The exact behavior of affected systems can vary slightly, but appears to largely be connected to the computer's power supply. While the connection remains largely stable when plugged into an AC adapter, switching to battery power renders the wireless link intermittent and in many cases drops network access entirely when idle.
"Whenever I unplug my AC adapter, my wireless Internet goes a little crazy and starts continually disconnecting and reconnecting moments later," says one owner.
Users often can't detect nearby networks after restarting the card through software, but can almost always regain a dependable connection after reattaching the power plug. A handful of owners report having to restart the computer to restore the Wi-Fi connection, however.
To date, the intermittent connection issue has not been publicly acknowledged by Apple and affects systems regardless of subsequent Mac OS X updates. Both the recent 10.4.11 update and all current versions of Leopard continue to exhibit the symptoms of the problem, although some note the situation improving for their systems after the most recent upgrades to both Leopard and Tiger.
For those still affected, successful workarounds have included reverting to Mac OS X 10.4.9 when possible, and setting up commands in Terminal that send out data to keep the connection active. But since the issue does not occur when running Windows XP or Vista in Boot Camp, several users say Apple has no reason to leave the apparent flaw unresolved.
"Wi-Fi works OK under other OS X releases and also with Windows Vista running on the MacBook hardware," says one report. "Apple's engineers need to quit playing with their iPhones, roll up their sleeves and look for bugs."
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Mine has been like this for a while, it sucks!
Mine has been like this for a while, it sucks!
Mine was like this for a long time as well, after upgrading to Leopard and updating to 10.5.1 the issue is almost non existent. Only a minor glitch when waking from sleep 1 out of 10 times I would say.
Steve
I have had the same issue with my 15 inch MacBook Pro (Purchased in Aug) running Leopard and all the current patches. When I accidentally disconnect the power supply and reconnect it I loose the connection to my Linksys wireless router (WRT300N). If I disable airport, then re-enable it, the connection comes back most of the time. Once I had to do a reboot to get it back. Additionally I noticed that the signal strength meter only shows 50% when power has been removed and restored. Normally the meter shows 100% as I am usually 15 feet away from the router.
Well I'm glad I'm not going crazy, I've been having wireless issues with my 1st generation black MacBook since upgrading to Leopard. Applying the 10.5.1 update did nothing for me and it doesn't matter whether I'm on battery or connected to the power adapter. The Macbook acts like it's having DNS issues, you'll go to Google and Google is fine, but then go to Yahoo! and the pages won't load fully and I can't get to my Yahoo! e-mail account. If I shut off the Airport connection and turn it back on everything is fine for about 5 minutes, then it starts acting up again. Sometimes it takes a reboot to fix the problem. I've been using it connected via a network cable since I upgraded it to Leopard and that seems to be the only way it works reliably. My Ubuntu notebook and Vista Media Center PC all work fine (at least until Vista decides to crash, which is often). I'm about two seconds from wiping the Macbook and going back to Tiger, but the aggravation in backing up all my stuff and re-installing all my applications once again has kept me from doing it so far. Here's hoping Apple comes out with a fix soon.