Q: MacBook Pro constantly losing wireless connectivity

I can't believe what I read here...everyone speaks about reading the prior posts and then goes on to repeat the same "fixes"...the 1st post on this thread was 10 months ago...the problem started almost a year ago (there were earlier threads) with the release of 10.5.2...then the rumor's started that 10.5.3 would fix it...well, here we are on 10.5.4 and we still have the problem...Houston, we have a problem (only 'Houston' doesn't appear to be listening)...the only 'fix' is called an ethernet cable...I don't even bother to take my MBP on trips anymore because I can't get online with Wi-Fi...Apple apparently doesn't care about a problem with their 'Professional' top-of-the-line 'portable'...any time anyone dares to mention a word about 'legal' actions, the post is deleted (if you subscribe to the thread you receive the email but by the time you go online to the thread to read the post, the big brother censors have already deleted it. I guess Steve just doesn't have time to crack the whip any more. Too bad...so far AppleCare has replaced my MBP logic board, battery, heat syncs, fans and the antenna on my AirPort card...great product design.

iStumbler had no effect on me either - all Airport wants to do is make a connection for a few seconds then keep on scanning and scanning. Feel so sorry for it since it never takes a break....

Add me to the list. My MacBook Pro (15in, 2.33 C2Duo) has been rock solid for almost two years, and now yesterday, out of nowhere, I can forget about maintaining a wireless connection. I have not installed any new software (aside from 10.5.5, hoping it might cure this sudden hickup) and I have not made any system modifications! I woke it from sleep as I have been doing for almost 2 years, and that is when the trouble began. I tried iStumbler, but that didn't work. I haven't tried to trash any preference files yet, but based upon what I have been reading, there really doesn't seem to be a solution... Ridiculous!!

Did the 10.5.5 update make a difference to anyone?

10.5 victims are not the only ones with problems. I am on 10.4.11 and have problems with getting a reliable connection while Windows systems sitting right next to me are breezing along with no problem. I can't get a signal in my bedroom, 15 feet from the router in another room, while my wife is operating at full strength. I still think that there is a hardware/interference susceptibility issue that is not going to be solved by a software fix.

Hi Guys, I see no real fix has been found as yet. I am still up and running with no real drop outs. However I was sitting in my lounge room playing music to my surround sound system via my airport express and the signal strength kept varying.(I was only sitting about 4 metres from the airport express) Most of the time I was able to play my music but if the signal dropped too much the music stopped playing. I had to hold the macbook pro closer and the signal would eventually pick up again and the music would come back. So things are better for me since I removed realplayer but I must say they are still far from perfect. Please apple/ Mr Jobs, please help with this very big issue. Even if it was to let us all know if you are even working on a fix.

nordster68: when you say 'still up and running with no real drop outs'...I think you will find, as I did, that you only think you have 'no real drop outs'. If you run AP Grapher (a free ware) that monitors your connectivity, you will see that what is happening is that your onboard AirPort makes a connection but a few seconds later, it is dropped, then it reconnects for a few seconds, then drops again. The AirPort icon (the 'radar' on your top bar) may show 'full strength' at 4 bars but the AP Grapher, which displays a percentage of connectivity on the top bar (for instance, while I am online right now, my connection is running between 35% and 48% with peaks to 52%). So, you may be 'connected' and you may not realize that anything is going on but your connection is constantly dropping and reconnecting and then dropping again. AP Grapher also displays this in graph form (the line looks like the teeth on a saw blade). Where you notice it while using your computer is drop outs on audio streaming (you run through the buffer during a connection drop) or when using your browser you will often get a message of 'server not found' when going from one page to another (you click on a new page at the same time as a connection drop). I have to admit that it is better than it was when the problem first appeared but it is still a problem. Right now I'm on a trip to California and connected to LinkSys. When I was changing planes in San Francisco day before yesterday, I was able to get online using iPass and check my email (my Blackberry showed me an email that I wanted to answer with an attachment from my MBP) but last week I was up in Vermont and I couldn't get online at the hotel while my brother-in-law sitting next to me was able to get on with PowerBook G4. It's only the MBPs (my wife has a PowerBook G4 and my daughter has a MacBook and they have no problems).

Slippy, forgive my ignorance, but what are we looking for on the graph--in other words, what is a "good" reading? My connection has been better the last few days, but the worst ever just this past weekend. And what is that "sonar" type noise? Thanks in advance.

with Leopard & wireless network

REMOVE REALPLAYER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On my Mac Book I could not keep a connection for more than 2 minutes. Drove me nuts.

Three Cheers to ThomasG!


I removed the recently installed Realplayer and voila. Connection, once again, fantastic. My two older Macs still running 10.4 had no issues staying connected. My symptoms mirrored those mentioned here. Full connectivity, full bar, constantly could not surf or get emails or sync or anything. Turn airport off, then on and that worked maybe 50% of time, otherwise full diagnostic run or some bizarre type of extreme reinstall might work, ugh! Ate up many many fruitless hours, until I uninstalled realplayer (the install of realplayer immediately followed these problems but I did not think it could possibly be the problem until I read ThomasG's post). Someone should tell Realplayer &&&&&& Apple. This is not just an MBP issue, I have a simple 13" Macbook, WITH Leopard. boy.

I realize that you may have done this already but...

A few people have said that they never installed realplayer similar to yourself but somehow ended up with it in their login startup.

ThomasG and Seppfett discovered my most beloved cure ever by discovering this little gaffe by "Apple & Real".

GlAF42 documents how to check, JUST in case....come on Nathan, give it a go.....I hope that this is your problem.......



by GLAF42

1) Under the Apple, select "System Preferences..."

(2) Within "System Preferences...", go to the fourth row, which has the heading, "Systems" and select the first icon from the left, which is labelled: "Accounts".

(3) Once inside "Accounts", click on "Login Items".

(4) If you have a item called "RealPlayer Downloader" (may not be precisely correct about title as I have vapourized mine), it may well be the source of your MBPs problems. (Diagnosis.)

The cure:

(5) Simply click one time on"RealPlayer Downloader" to cause it to be highlighted, then remove it from "login Items" by clicking once on the "-" (the minus sign) that sits just beneath the sentence that begins with: "To hide an application when you log in ...". Please note that "clocking on the hide checkbox will accomplish nothing for you. You must remove the item from Login Items, not just cause it to be hidden at startup.

(6) Restart your computer.

(7) start enjoying your MBP wirelessly again.

Thanks ThomasG and Seppfett.

Not even a little.

Personally, I suspect they just don't consider this a problem anymore.

I've even given up following this thread. I check back once a month or so, see that Apple's done nothing, sigh, and go on about turning my Airport off and on again a few times every time I wake up my system.

yankeegal: I would hope that a 'good' reading would be 100%, i.e., once you are connected, you stay connected - similar to a hard wired Ethernet connection. The saw tooth graph depicts the connection at the peak of each 'tooth' and a dropped connection at the bottom. I guess what we would want would be a straight line at the top 'peak' level.

I believe that the 'sonar' sound is just to notify you that the application is running.

BTW, another way to test your connectivity is to use speedtest.net which I did originally to determine if I was connected. I did it using my Wi-Fi connection (at home I use the AirPort Extreme Base Station and work we use NetGear) and then using my Ethernet connection. The interesting thing was that when I ran Windows on the same machine, I got no dropped connections - which led me to believe that it was a software problem and not hardware related. It was amazing to see the dramatic difference. I did this both at home and at the office. Because I have a 1st gen MBP, I can't use the 'n' frequency and must use the 'g'.

As you probably noticed in the many posts here, people who had just bought brand new MBPs had this same problem right out of the box.

Hi Guys,

As most of you, I was having problems with the wireless connector on my Macbook and I think I found a solution. PLEASE KEEP READING BECAUSE THIS SOLUTION MAY NOT APPLY TO ALL OF YOU. My MB constantly kept on loosing connection with the wireless router at my college. When I was at home it worked fine, but every time I was in school, it would connect to the school's network, the Airport connection icon would even show "full bars" but after a minute or so, web pages would just not load!!! I got in the habit of turning the airport on an off. this would fix the problem, but after a minute or of inactivity, the connection was gone again. I tried everything, apple help desk, the schools IT dept. but nothing helped. I did find out that the school uses D-link routers, but that was it. I was running Lepard, but I also ran Windows vista on the same computer, and every time I was on windows, I never had any problems. So I new that the problem was with my software. Also, I noticed that a lot of my friends, who also owned macs were unaffected. so the problem WAS NOT THE ROUTERS, IT WAS SOMETHING WITH THE SOFTWARE IN MY COMPUTER.

well a couple of months past and one day at a friend's house, I tried to connect to his network, at a weird warning page from his ISP pooped up as soon as I open the browser. It told me that my computer was infected with some kind of TROJAN HORSE, and that it was trying to change my internet settings. I was somewhat suprised that there was a trojan on my MAC, after all, those are PC'S problems not MACS, so i thought. So big was my confidence, that I never bother to have any kind of anti-virus software, on the Mac side of my computer. I only installed one on windows but not on MAC OS

well, the page did give instructions as to how to get rid of it an I did.

FOR MY SPECIFIC CASE I WAS INFECTED WITH THE DNScharger trojan horse, there was a free removal tool that I found online and that fixed my problem.

hope it helps!!!!

I've been lurking on this thread for a while. I posted extensively on the original threads that started in November back when this problem started. It occurs on two macbook pro's, two macbooks, and a macmini (which has wireless n upgrade kit from a mac pro installed) when Leopard is installed (clean installs). If I go back to Tiger the macbooks and macmini are fine, the wireless performance of the MBP's are significantly increased, although sat next to a macbook the macbook outperforms it by far (connection strength/transfer speed).

There are a number of issues with airport extreme and leopard when DHCP is unreliable at best in certain situations.

I have never had real-player (not since Win98ish) and to be honest I don't know why anyone would want it.

Boot Camp windows works fine with the supplied drivers.

Despite the number of people who have found temporary fixes/workarounds. The same card under-performs in a MBP compared to any other intel macs, using this card in a MBP with leopard tends to be a bit of a disaster, (even new ones are still the same).

This means that the design of this machine doesn't help wireless reception, but it appears that there's something in the way leopard handles network connections and it flunk's more often and more severely.

If you look at the way the OS is built you will find less linux/unix related folder structures and more proprietary mac file names/folder structures (I discovered this when trying to set up ICS and trying to find out why it kept losing it's own IP address).

Having gone back to Tiger, and getting a new internet connection installed, and setting everything on the airport extreme to default (then ramping up the speed to 5GHz n only), I now enjoy relatively hassle free wireless. But if a machine has to be rebooted in the middle of surfing the web you can guarantee it's one of the MBP's.

Basically we're waiting for the part of the OS that handles this stuff to be re-written, which since it hasn't been done but it's better in Tiger to me means that they're not going to fix it because they probably can't. Hence the rushed Snow Leopard announcement saying "no visual improvements, under the bonnet changes only" (what leopard should have been)

I'm skipping 10.5. as 10.5.5 (no observable difference to wireless connection) is out now, Leopards got to be roughly halfway through it's life now already. by the time 10.6 is 6 months old (I'm never buying a new mac os again) it'll be time to buy a new machine (the MBP will be 3 years old by then)

It is a shame that leopard has such major performance issues, as it does look pretty, and has some useful features but not enough to make it worth it.

I have replicated and documented this all extensively and sent it all to apple (rather than just moaning) but have yet to have a response/see a fix.