Q: MacBook Pro constantly losing wireless connectivity

Get a Netis wifi stick they work better than Apples   wifi ever did.

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Has anyone tried checking the network / wifi cables and cleaning them?

There are some "instructional" videos on youtube about this. Like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsSIUs7jzQc

Also see this guide, it shows where all the cables and parts are and how to take them apart:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+AirPort+Card+Replacement /8987

Especially if your warranty has expired anyway, why not give this a try. It seems to have worked for some people. If it works for you, please post here!

Oh FFS this thread has been ongoing for years. Get it though your heads. There is no fix. No amount of cleaning cables, or disk repairs or pram resets or network resets etc etc is going to fix it. It's a flaw with Apples computers and they should have fixed it years ago but for some very weird reason they have continued to deny the entire debacle. Do yourselves a favour and don't buy apple next time.

I was so desperate to get this working I bought an antique brass frame bedstead and attached it to an old dustbin lid with a wire coathanger, which in turn was connected into the usb port on my Macbook Pro.

Unfortunatly it didnt work, maybe i need to sellotape a wooden spoon to the dustbin lid or something.

Seriously though, these wireless issues are complete joke, all other laptops, pc`s, devices in my house work fine, only my spanking brand new macbook pro has the problem. As a test I also ran windows 8 under boot camp and there was no issue so it must be software related.

I dont know how that head designer guy Jony Ive has the hard neck to put out videos on the apple web site bigging up this pile of unreliable garbage.

I AGREE! I am one of the original posters, who's angry rants has been pulled by Apple Support and deleted. I'm on Twitter now, trying to get the word out. Maybe social media will work. OR~

Start calling Apple Support every day.

This is crazy, I have been searching for a fix for this as well and I can't believe it has not been addressed.

+1 Very disapointed in Apple not stepping up to address this known issue.

I just got bit also.  Have a mid 2009 MBP.  Been pretty happy with it until now.  After reading about all others with the wireless non connectivity problem and Apple not stepping up to do anything about it, my next purchase may not be another MBP.

i struggled with slow wifi on a 2013 macbook pro retina and tried a lot of router changes, reset my router and finally changed from B/G/N to B/G. That worked incredibly well. On my other computers, i used to just ahve some intermittent drops and slight slowness, but on the macbook pro, various speedtests inside and outside my network were all 1/3 the speed of a Win7 PC and an iphone. The suggestion about eliminating wireless N from the router protocols was a good one and worked for me. I've had channel issues before, so that doesn't seem like a bad idea, but this time i think i really got to the root of the problem.

I think we can surely say that the root of the problem is the wireless network cards used by Apple, since 2008 product lines, and they just don´t give a care or this is proposital, maybe to sell the only devices compatible.

I bought a used MacBook Pro 2009 in perfect conditions, even in the box.

Using Mavericks or Mountain Lion, wifi card keeps just disconnecting from my own network, tried numbers of software basic reconfiguration that didn´t work for me (and a LOT of people) and neither reconfiguring the router or changing channels solved the problem.

Maybe I would be obliged to use Snow Leopard so I can use wifi, or virtualize Mavericks to use Logic X virtualized (sic).

Even easier is just use this stupid computer for producing...

The reason I bought this MBP was to avoid any troubles, but I am really getting annoied by restoring and upgrading versions of Mac OSX.

We have here more than 120 pages of complains in all these years and a lot of customers (that just tried anything) are still waiting for a response or solution from Apple.

Like someone above said, maybe we just be listened by  them through media.

Let´s  just tag #macwifiloss in order to get some attention to the faulty products.

If this problem don´t get solved, this MBP will be my last Mac*hit.

I've been in the same boat as a lot of other people, losing wifi constantly on my mid-2010 MBP. There are a ton of threads on here, hopefully I'm in one that will help someone else. In the last week or so I decided to try to isolate it and beat it into submission. I'm not saying this is the answer to everyone's issues and that I made this discovery or anything, I'm just hoping to help someone else. I know how frustrating this is.

This actually began for me a couple months ago, just prior to the release of Mavericks. I was hoping at the time that Maverics would fix it, but it just got worse. My MBP would seemingly randomly drop the connection to my Time Capsule. Oddly, it would seem to go in spurts, sometimes every couple days, other times it was very regular. To add a little to this story, a couple months prior to this starting, my MBP's motherboard was replaced under Applecare. I was at the end of the Applecare agreement and this didn't start until after the 90 days you get on a warranty swap, so going back to Apple was out. It was a little while before I realized what a rampant problem this was by doing some searches. After finding the forums were loaded with this issue, I tried the various fixes I found. These included:

1. Downgrading the Time Capsule firmware.

2. Changing the TC so that the 5ghz band wasn't being used.

3. Changing the MTU.

4. Deleting the files that contain the network info on the Mac.

5. Deleting the network keys and network itself, then reattaching.

6. Repaired permissions.

7. Cleared caches.

I'd almost come to the conclusion that the airport card was bad and looked into changing it. It's actually not a big deal on this model if you've done any kind of computer work previously, and you can find replacement cards out there with a little searching in the $20 range. I actually ordered a USB network dongle, figuring I could use it elsewhere if nothing else. In the meantime I kept trying to figure this out.

I found one post where another user had started a ping process in the background via terminal, and another post which suggested disabling all power saving functions. I did both of these, and holy crap... it was still connected the next morning. OK, so what fixed it? I disabled the pinging and it still seemed to be ok. Then I reenabled the screen power saving and let it sleep. On waking, it still worked... but only for a couple minutes before it would hang. I did it again with the same result. OK! I could duplicate the problem. In retrospect, this was pretty much how it always occurred. I have the computer near me constantly and the screen power saving was set pretty low, around 10 minutes. I'd set the computer down for a bit, pick it up and start using it, and wham... it'd soon hang. What was deceptive for me was that it wasn't hung on waking up. It was a few minutes later, so the issue wasn't obvious.

I wasn't done yet (I tend to kinda get locked in on stuff like this. I want to know why). On a suggestion from my son, I disabled Wake on LAN, then reenabled the screen power savings. That seemed to do it. It's been running flawlessly ever since.

I know someone else has found the Wake on LAN approach. I'm not trying to take credit for it, just documenting to try and help everyone else. My own conclusion based on all this is that there are multiple possible fixes due to some incompatibility between the MBP motherboard and the Broadcomm wifi card that Apple uses. Maybe a clean install of the OS would fix this as well, fortunately I did have to try that. It's easy enough to do a clean install and migrate the user info back, but the migration might reintroduce the problem so I'm glad I didn't have to try it. I have no idea why disabling Wake on LAN should fix this. In the post I saw, the guy who found it said he disabled, rebooted, then reenabled and the problem was still gone. Since I don't really care about Wake on LAN anyway, I haven't tried that. This is a horrendous problem and I'm not taking a chance on reintroducing it. Given how the problem started for me, seemingly out of nowhere while I was still on ML, I'm guessing that something out of the ordinary triggered it... maybe an update, a reboot, something I gave no thought to at the time.

Thanks for your hard work.

To lend perspective, I have an original Intel MacBook Pro 1,1 and have had this problem from the beginning.

I am now running OS X 10.6.8.

A while back I replaced the original 802.11a/b/g card with one from eBay supporting 802.11n hoping this would improve performance.  So far the only thing that works for me is:

Network Preferences > Advanced > Require administrator password to: (check box) Turn Airport On or Off.

I'm amazed that I have never had WiFi problems with my iPod Touch or iPad and that this problem persists in the newest MBPs.

Have you ever tried a fresh install? I mean basically backing up your machine, wiping the drive, and reinstalling? My theory is TCP gets corrupted somewhere along the line and the problem manifests itself with certain wifi cards. An inplace install or upgrade might just perpetuate the problem. That was going to be my next step, but since it's working now I'm reluctant to take it.

And excuse me if this is obvious, but I meant trying the wifi before migrating your existing stuff back via Migration Assistant. I've seen some posts where supposedly Apple techs recommended deleting some if the existing network files. While sometimes that apparently worked and other times not, it kind of lends some credence to my theory about TCP issues.

I simply cannot replicate this problem.  I am using a number of devices that are taken on and off my network, and switch between networks often. I have been through a number of OS X and IOS operating system versions on a number of devices, and no problems with wireless stability whatsoever. I have used the same Apple Airport Extreme wireless router for the last 5 years. My signal is always reliable. I am stumped. One has to wonder how much of the problem could be related to wireless environmental overlap from not only 802.11 but 2.6ghz devices and others as well...., at least in some of the cases. If I come across anything at all that might shed some light on the issue, I will surely post it here.

Don,

That's part of the problem. Not everyone has it, and I don't think anyone knows what initially triggers it. Some people seem to have it out of the box, with others it happens later. My MBP is a little over 3 years old and I never had a problem with it until a few months ago. Like I said, I think something akin to a stack corruption in Windows maybe, or possibly an incompatibility between some Broadcom wireless cards and some MBP motherboards. I wish I had another one or two MBP's exhibiting this problem to experiment with. I think I've got enough experience now to maybe figure it out.