Mac Mini M2 wifi issues

Good suggestion, at this point i have given up, all apple devices in the exact same location all report extremely high speed. I cannot waste anymore time with said device. Since I'm past the return, how do I get a refund? I've been on Apple phone service over an hour, then went to the store, another few hours there... im a professional who cannot waste multiple days on this. I really don't care about the money, i just want to drop it off at an apple store and tell them to throw it in the trash. What should I do? Dispute with credit card?

just letting others know that "AP" presumably stands for 'access point'

your explanation looks promising. too bad i've already returned my device ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ but i hope others will try and corroborate your solution.

Thanks so much for sharing. Very interesting!

I really hope it's not a hardware issue but I'm still wondering why this seems to be no problem with the older m1 models etc.

Anyway, I will check that as soon as i'm home and report back.

I could still return my mini m2 but would prefer not to...

@kcasner Although your suggestion to change Wi-Fi channels did fix my slow Wi-Fi connection, it hasn't fixed the internet dropouts I'm seeing when accessing the Displays system settings, or waking my iPhone.

I agree about not being forced to change the entire setup just to allow one mac mini to connect to wifi - everything else in the house just works, and we have a bunch of macbooks / ipads etc.

I tried all the solutions here and decided to return the mini. Thanks @Kcasner and @Julian Wright, I found your pointers really useful.

Will come back to it once Apple does some decent testing of basic functionality

They are unaware of 14 pages of posts on their own discussion forum. And the first link that comes up on Google when you type in Mac Mini Wifi...

One has to admire their tenacity to avoid looking at a problem :)

I'm using Mesh WiFi via Linksys router (one 2.4GHz channel + dual 5GHz channel: 44 & 153).

Normally my Mac mini in channel: 44

The ping of my Mac mini keeping in 0.1x - 0.2x ms only (with AWDL turned on).

During the test, I have tried Airplay & Airdrop from iPad to Mac mini.

Thats hard wired (Ethernet), there’s no other way achieve 0.1-.2ms. Ethernet assigns a lower metric, changing the routing table. If you have both connected, it will default to Ethernet. AWDL (Apple Wireless Data Link) only affects WiFi.

The Command Line Tools for Xcode won't do anything for this issue - they're just Terminal commands that work alongside Apple's Xcode programming environment. If you're not using your Mac for software development, Xcode and the Xcode command line tools don't need to be installed, and don't affect any core macOS functionality.

I just checked the contents of the Xcode Command Line tools install package, and there's just thousands of files related to software development frameworks, SDKs, macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS all of which get installed into the ./Library/Developer/ directory. Nothing at all for the core operating system.

I'm absolutely certain if any fixes for system issues were released, they would be in a mandatory core system update, not a optional developer tools one.

Is it just a sw issue? If it were, given the quite widespread nature of the feedback (first meaningful posts I could find go back to December 2022), would they not have been been able to fix it ?

The symptoms and workarounds are fairly well posted now.

Thanks for the feedback Julian, and I concur.

I was on an Amplifi Alien (WiFi 6). This was before I knew about AWDL and it forcing channels. I have not tested it since changing to my enterprise setup.

I'm curious on what you find. I'd switch back to test along side you, but people are home atm and i'll get yelled at. Besides, my test wouldn't be any better than yours.

Since i am on channel 44 for 5Ghz my pings are low.

But, i just noticed some interesting things:

When i switch to my 2,4ghz Wifi, behaviour is like in your picture with the red squares.

I think channel 6 might not be right channel for 2,4ghz (i live in germany)

The interesting part: Exact same behaviour on my 10 year old retina Macook Pro (running Big Sur)!!

Ping even times out occasionally (only 2,4ghz). I think this has always been this way, but i have never noticed it doing normal browsing etc.

Another interesting thing i noticed is, that if i click on the wifi symbol while i'm running the ping, i'm kinda simulating the channel switching leading to higher pings. I assume this is because opening the wifi menu tells the OS to scan for WiFis on all channels, leaving the current channel for a short amount of time.

Interesting... thanks for checking. Now I'm wondering what's different about my setup that's causing my pings to increase to the extent that my connection effectively goes offline (can't connect to anything on the Internet, although Wi-Fi is still on).

This will sound like T1 support, and honestly I wouldn't want you to try it... but have you re-installed MacOS?

I lost count how many times I've done this for support, to please them. More than i'm willing to admit. It never helped, and now I know why.