Q: MacBook Pro constantly losing wireless connectivity

Well this is more so apple can see how many unsatisfied customers they have then to get any help because i have tried every thing every one has recommended. I too have a MBP its 5 months old now and i have leopard, but my airport connection *****, it is vary unreliable, i purchased a new computer because i have a lot of school work that i need internet connection for and the family computer, well was the families if i spent to much time on it every one got pissey, i purchased a mac which was $1000 more then a windows because i hers the were a better computer for younger folk and students, but so far my $2200 investment is not reliable, apple needs to come up with a solution be for we all demand our money back, i did not pay 2200 so i could have a portable dvd player, of a cool screen thing i got it for all the features a computer has and specifically so i could acses the internet and do my home work.

Have you tried contacting Apple directly?

Within the one year time frame, you should still have access to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store.

If you purchased the warranty, you would still have phone access to AppleCare as well.

Have they come up with any solutions? Or at least offered to attempt some hardware repairs?

I have contacted AC on the phone regarding this problem many times. And always the same solution, move up closer to the router. They always believe its an issue of the signal getting interference.
How many times can one complain to AC until they start to figure out a pattern?

Hello everybody!

I was having the same issue and it was VERY frustrating!

I have, however found a work-around that seems to be working for me.

I noticed that whenever our cordless phone rings, that my connection to the Internet drops, yahoo messenger disconnects..etc.

So I changed the channel that my Airport Extreme broadcasts on to channel 3, and am also using WPA2, and forwarded all of the phone calls from our cordless phone to my cell phone (as we barely used the cordless phone anyway) and now I have no problem with wireless at all.

I never drop anymore, but have a problem with waking out of sleep mode sometimes (black screen and no wake-up).

For that problem I remedied it by turning of the wireless adapter and turning off bluetooth before putting my MBP to sleep.

Hope this helps!

Mark

these 'fixes' about changing wireless channels and such, are for people who didn't have their network set up correctly to begin with. While I am glad that it fixed it for you, there are a whole host of people that have only had this since leopard (and I mean constantly dropping the connection, visually dropping it after a few reconnects and after a few manually reconnects turning the airport off and failing to come back on without a restart).

Ditching any apple networking equipment. going back to 10.4.10 and not using wireless n completely resolves all the issues and you will no longer hate using your machine and wish you didn't own a mac (as I did for the 4 months I used leopard on my 3 machines).

There is *NO FIX AT ALL* for those of you who can go back to tiger as I have described before and on many other threads (check leopard forums internet and networking subcategory)

*PLEASE PLEASE* report this to any regulatory bodies and media in your country as apple will not do anything about this and will simply sweep it under the carpet. (If in the UK I strongly urge you to report this to watchdog)

I am an IT technician and am paid to sort this sort of thing out, and as a mac specialist I get given all the mac jobs that come through my place of work. I simply tick the box that says *"Pre-loaded software fault"* send them back to apple (if under warranty) and move on, as I have seen this too many time to mention.

If you have a new Macbook Pro, MacBook, iMac of Mac Mini and suffer from this *take it back, demand a new one and keep doing so till you get one that actually works* Maybe that way we can force apple to take this as seriously as the time machine doesn't work for airport disks issue which I believe was resolved. I don't know as I abandoned 10.5 a good month or so ago; and it has been a good month, everything works (except Apple TV so no surprises there then).

Happy complaining :-[
Ryland


P.S. Posts like this seem to get threads shut down so someone may want to start a new one soon.

P.P.S. I can't say who I work for, I might get sacked!!!

I'm having a similar issue - when i got my mac book pro it didn't connect to the internet at all - even though my sister's mac book had no issues, i took it back to the place i bought it and they said it was working fine, it took me and my mum hours of fiddling about with different settings to get it to work. the internet and airport were working fine for about a week until yesterday when i picked it up and the internet just wasn't connecting at all. i feel like we've tried everything and it's still not connecting at all. i've had it less than a month and have apple care - do you think i should take it back and demand a replacement, would that solve the issue? is it a case of luck whether you can a mac book pro with functioning airport or not - or is it a problem with all of them?? any help much appreciated!

You should demand a new one. You should gather all the information you can, proving the problem is your laptop. you should then show this to the people in the shop. If they refuse you should take it higher than the shop level, complain and essentially be a real b*stard about it till you get what you want.

Currently the airport cards are being manufactured by two different manufacturers. they do not sell machines with one type of card in one country and another in another. The machines are assembled in China, and the cards (made to apple spec) are shipped in from wherever and the finished products go global. Therefore you may buy one with one card then the next machine sold in the same shop may have the other type.

With the constantly dropping out issue it could be solved by having the other card or maybe a different logic board? I don't know but it certainly isn't all of them or one or the other airport card, both appear to not work at all in certain circumstances but fine in others. neither worked at all with my apple airport extreme base station.

Assuming you get one that works you will still have the DNS retention issue where the machine occasionally can't find the next page whilst browsing when it's been working for hours and is still connected etc etc

In short there are other major leopard bugs. If it were me I would find a friend with a MBP that came with Tiger. get the hard drive out of your machine (after backing up all your data. Put the hard drive in a casing (to make it a external USB/firewire drive) plug it to said Tiger MBP and install Tiger onto your hard drive. put it back inside you machine and update it to 10.4.9 and leave it at that. I would then import all my data and take an image of my hard drive using disk utility. Of course you could also try Target disk mode and plugging your machine directly into the old one. I have heard reports that using an older install disk on a new machine stops you from installing it. I know using a newer one than the one that came with it fails.

et voila a machine that works perfectly with the best commercially available OS in history (Tiger)

Generally if you installed leopard and started with Tiger then you should go back if you are having these issues.

Hello, I too have a Mac exclusive network but am still suffering with network problems. I just received my MacBookPro 2.6 this week and can NOT get it to recognize my Airport Time Capsule's "n" network. My 3 AppleTvs and several older MacBooks connect to "n" with no problem. I have a bridged AEBS configured for "g". Our iphones, printers and powerbooks connect with no problem. The ONLY device with a problem is my brand new MacBook Pro 2.6. It will not even recognize the "n" Airport, even when I change the settings to a compatible. I thought perhaps someone was sleeping on the assembly line but my profile shows my Airport card as "n" compatible
Since I have a Mac only network, any suggestions? Thanks.

Boot into Boot Camp to prove that the airport card works perfectly. Follow the steps in my above post.

There is nothing you can do to stop this in leopard if youe network is setup properly, which it sounds like it is.

My MacBook (not Pro) still continues to suffer from this problem when connected on battery power.

<Since I have a Mac only network, any suggestions? >
My honest suggestion is to take it back, get a full refund and wait until Apple fixes this problem before buying it again. It appears that the only way Apple is going to fix this, is if hits their pocket book. And the only way to do that is to boycott the MBP.

Other than that, you can hook up to an Ethernet connection, which will give you great connectivity.

I have a 1st gen MBP and I'm suffering through this by using the wire (Ethernet). But I bought my son a 17" MBP with all the extras ($4,000USD) and he has the same problem. Fortunately for him, he uses his MBP to create animation artwork and only uses the Wi-Fi for email and FaceBook (which is when he sees the problem). While I can't take mine back (due to its age) and can only rely on AppleCare, I've advised him to take his back.

I think this suggestion is a bit reckless. I mean, yes, this thread is long and if you isolate the number of unique posters with the problem, it does raise some questions. However, it is clear to me this is not a defect in the MBP. How many MBP have been sold with no issues? This is a problem for a small percentage of us. Take that with my own experience, it went away on its own, I have to believe it is some sort of variables that in combination cause instability in the wireless network connection. This will take sometime to sort out. Still, Apple needs to work on this for sure. Just need to balance responses I think.

Hi! I am not sure, but I have gone back to basics and tried:-

1. Reset of the 2Wire BT 2700HGV Router to factory settings to clear any settings that may have caused connection problem.
2. Not having any security settings (briefly).
3. Changed and tried various Channels.

Still no luck

Many people have suggested bad system software, software upgrade required or faulty airport cards (this might be relevant in some peoples cases). I might agree with this, but I have had no problem using the MacBook Pro for hours in a hotel which was using a t-mobile wifi hot spot and then just last week i worked from a customers connection (i spotted a linksys in the corner - not sure about the ISP) but, again, i connected for 8 hrs every day!

Over the weekend my friend used his lovely Samsung PC sat next to me with no problems whatsoever! While I had to reconnect about 20 times. Like many other people I have no problems connecting with my old iBook G4 (now dead hence getting an MBP) also I can connect no problem using a G5 tower and a paperclip as an arial. At a guess these older machines probably use 802.11g Cards.

I don't believe EMC (interference) is the problem here. If it is then the MBP Airport Card is possibly ultra sensitive? My final test with this router can only be sitting it next to the MBP to rule out any interference.

I wonder if the fault might be because the New MacBook Pro is 802.11n and the router is only 802.11b/g 802.11b or 802.11g

I considered buying Airport Extreme to save wasing anymore time - then i read it is not a Modem! I have an older Belkin Router so i will try that next i think. If I still have problems I think I will have to resort to buying a Linksys 802.11n Router or similar I think.

It is really unacceptable. I am a computer programmer who has experience writing drivers, and I'd just give anything to have the source code of the IO80211Family.kext

Doing an ifconfig en1 debug adds nothing to the console log. How in the world is that possible? Are they so afraid that people will actually know where the problem is? I mean, why isn't there a way to make it verbose? I'm not asking for 7 different debug levels, just for a way to display messages like "oh, I dropped this packet cause I couldn't send it, it failed at the XXXX step of the protocol, dumped here: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" or "trying to authenticate using XXX, sent credentials, waiting for handshake" or "hey, I get plenty of packets for another SSID on that channel".

I mean, if you can't fix it, let the community do it, we'll be very happy to loose 20 or 100 hours fixing it instead of not being able to use our MBP at all when there isn't an ethernet socket nearby.

Apple really are control freaks, they never stopped to be. When you control exactly which hardware your OS will run on, and it doesn't run perfectly, it's just an insult to the customers who paid. I bought a mac because I bought into the "BSD that will run majors apps" buzz, but now I really regret it. Next time, it'll be an OpenBSD laptop and that's it.

I agree with you that Apple has control over the hardware and software and therefore should deliver higher performing products that work flawlessly. I have experienced just this over my year and half of using a Mac. I also understand that to get this level of performance, I give up some flexibility…especially on the hardware side. Having typed that, I have had a couple of issues that I did not expect. For example, I would love to upgrade my graphics card in my Mac Pro but since it is a Gen 1 with PCI Express 1.0, I cannot move to the new cards. I’m stuck with the ATI 1900 that introduces artifacts on my screen when it runs a bit hot…but that is another thread.
Back on tract. Why doesn’t everyone who has connectivity issues drop Apple a line? If someone could please post the link so we can provide Apple with the appropriate feedback that would be great. I have seen it posted somewhere but can’t remember where. I think this is the best course of action since this isn’t an issue for most MBP users but it doesn’t seem significant enough that Apple engineers need to work on it.