MacBook Pro constantly losing wireless connectivity

If the internet is cutting off, and you are getting the same strange behaviour with the Airport fan icon, I would say that there is a good chance that it is your cable. The reason that it happened out of the blue? I suspect that the ribbon cable is getting pinched somwhere against the bottom cover of the macbook. The daily wear and tair and bumps that it gets on the underside probably resulted in the cable getting damaged in this way. I am meaning to investigate this further when I get the chance by checking the space given to the cable between the bottom cover and the motherboard/case.

Oh, I understand what you're saying. It makes sense given the large number of people having the issue too. I've tried pretty much everything else other than an exorcism.

This would be a good explanation had this been true for me. But I had an old 2007 white MB and newer MB that were having this isse. I have never replaced anything but the laptops (MBPs) and THAT is the only thing that solved my problem. Still running the old cables, Airport, etc.

Funnily enough, I also had an old white macbook that also had similiar wifi issues. It turned out that a particular batch of the atheros wifi cards had driver issues with snow leopard and above.The solution was to downgrade the .kext file to that of leopard. Unfortunately, the older driver was not compatiable with some of the later issues of OSX and was one of the reasons that I sold the macbook. As far as I know, the issue was pretty well confirmed on the forums but there was no official fix.

Thanks for the info, BananaMacintosh. I truly hope your cable-replacement idea finds success for some people, but at this point (how many years have we been mucking around with this issue? at least two, personally), I can almost guarantee it will not be a universal fix for everyone.

I am among several other posters on this forum who experience NO wi-fi problems whatsoever when using their MacBooks in Windows mode (i.e., booting up into a Bootcamp partition running Windows). I don't think that would make sense if a cable were the culprit, since one would presume that the wi-fi behavior in both OSs would be equally affected.

Thanks for taking the time to put out some very detailed info, though. As I said, I hope it does the trick for at least a few people.

I agree. Especially since my wifi loss issue had nothing to do with Windows partitioning. However, it did increase in occurrance once I added a Guest log in for a friend who came to live with us.

Interestingly my wifi connectivity seems to have stabilised.

Whilst I was trying to get my Seagate Central external HDD to work with Time Capsule, it involved playing around with my dlink router settings at the same time, but I received an error message that another device had the same IP address as my Mac.

At the same time, I took the time to update the firmware for my router as I didn't realise mine was a year out of date.

After that, I turned every wireless device off, turned the router off and turned it back on and then one by one turned each wireless device wifi back on so the router could reassign an IP address.

One thing I forgot to turn back on was the Seagate Central external HDD and I only realised when I received an error that I hadn't backed up for a while. But then I also realised that I hadn't had any wifi dropouts either.

I've restarted the Seagate Central - It's taken about three days to start the backup process again as it couldn't find the time capsule backup drive - maybe there have been bandwidth issues backing up over wifi whilst streaming season 1 of Breaking Bad to my Apple TV!

Anyway, so far I haven't had any more wifi drop-outs.

My wifi USB dongle from Amazon arrived today so that will be my backup if wifi drops out again.

As strangely as my WiFi stop last Spring and a restarted in August and has been solid since (while I try to ignore the situation as not to jinx it and I count my blessings), it just stopped again the other day. Now it comes and goes, visually in icons and control panels, but mostly the Menu Bar Icon says one ting and the Control Panel says another. But as a whole does not work. And this is no matter what partition with 10.6, 10.7, 10.8 or 10.9 that I boot to, the WiFi acts the same across the board. I'm in the proces of swapping out routers to see if's not a finicky hardware issue. I'm running a Netgear R6300v1 that is said to have "issues" that all during the warranty when I was talking directly to Netgear, they never said anything. And users are saying that after about a year they start to "die off". And mine Well in a reply to my review on Newegg, it was openly admitted in that reply and offer of help, that there are problems. So I'm going back to the last solid unit I had running DD-WRT firmware that makes most all units it's on operate their best. Too bad they don't have a solid version for the 6300v1 yet. Also looking at the ASUS RT-68U, I think it is.

So back to hardwiring when I can and feeling like I have a 17" tumor. And things were going so well.

Well swapped out routers and the WiFi came back up for about the same amount of time that it does when it choses to with the other router. So since the whole house connected to the other one, I put it back and WiFi came back. I surfed for a while and just a few seconds ago the icon went gray, and I don't have an Internet connection. Got to go reenable the Ethernet. OK Ethernet is on now and the CP and the icon both agree for once and says that WiFi is On, but not connected. Option-click on the icon showed networks and, Hold On, it's trying to come back up and I got the Wireless Diagnostics pop up, then the networks disappeared, but it still says it's on and is looking for a network. I have four, and there are many in my area. We're all on different channels and I use 5GHz and most others only use 2.4. This go around it comes back on for a short time when I wake it. The amount of time varies dynamically. Hup, the CP and Icon are not saying the same thing. CP says off, Option-Click Icon says On.

One thing I have noticed, is that if I plug in the Ethernet cable, sometimes the WiFi comes back kinda like a little child that see another that has a shiny toy that it wants to play with too. I leave both on and just watch the icon to see what happens. It was swell for a while. But the swelling has gone down.

i had no idea this was such a big problem. the macbook i purchased for my girlfriend has this problem constantly. i thought it just might've been my router but seeing this now i know it isn't. is there a good wireless usb i can purchase that would fix this ?

Going to post this again - since I HAVE NOT LOST THE CONNECTION IN MANY MONTHS -- thanks to 2dutch:

Open Finder and navigate to this directory:

/Library/Preferences/System Configuration

Delete these files:

com.apple.airport.preferences.plist

com.apple.network.identification.plist

com.apple.smb.server.plist

NetworkInterfaces.plist

preferences.plist

Restart machine.

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And in the meantime:

Apple has a problem with MacBooks dropping WiFi and they are ignoring the problem. Thread on their forum for 5yrs, & no action

<Link Edited By Host>

This had been an ocassional issue for me. The constant dropping of the wifi signal has become the norm instead of the exception. It happens on the iPad and Macbook Pro and is only slightly better on the iPod. This is beyond rediculous. If misery loves company then this forum should be quite thrilled. Hate to see I'm not alone with this issue.

Hmm I'm not sure that's likely to be the same issue (in fact I'm pretty sure there are multiple problems with similar symptoms in this whole thread) because my iPad never had a problem but the MacBook would drop all the one after being in suspend. The plist files solution didn't work for me but a new router did.

I have a black 2007 Macbook, a 2012 Macbook pro 15" and spaking new 13" Macbook pro work computer, and ONLY the 2012 Macbook Pro is having WiFI issues.... think clearly there needs to be a recall by Apple, Inc. on the defective prodcut I have purshased...

I'm almost reluctant to write this. I'm afraid of putting the whammy on a fix that worked.

On 1/7, BananaMacintosh wrote a nice post detailing how he fixed his wireless issue by replacing the airport cable. Unlike some of the other problems mentioned here, my machine behaved the same as his in that the "fan" icon would show a full strength connection when wireless dropped. Shutting off wireless would show no connection, as it should, but there was no way to reenable it without a reboot.

I had already purchased a USB dongle which worked really well, but the situation just bothered me. I wanted the machine to behave as it should. A replacement cable on ebay was $14, so I figured I'd give it a try. It's 5 full days now and it hasn't dropped once. In my case at least, this fixed the problem.

It's obvious this isn't the fix for everyone's problem. A number of other things sometimes work and sometimes don't for other people, so there's more than one issue going on here. If you have the strange "fan" behavior though, this may be the answer.

Thanks BananaMacintosh.