Mac Mini M2 wifi issues

I have mesh WiFi and I had one of the nodes in the same room, no barriers. And my M2 Pro Mac Mini is also hopelessly unreliable over WiFi. I was doing a big file copy and I gathered the USB cables were causing interference. Then I thought maybe the Mac Mini dock it was sat on was blocking the signal.

Got rid of that and finished copying and I was still losing connection, constantly. Unusable. While my iPad next to it carries on as if nothing is wrong.

Ended up running an Ethernet cable from the WiFi to the Mac. Seems ridiculous.

Bluetooth seems fine though…

Just seen the other replies. I don’t think my TP link Deco lets you separate the bands. As different networks. Would seem to lose the simplicity of a mesh network. It’s on Apple to fix I think.

Thanks for this suggestion, but unfortunately it didn't work for me. I ran the disable command and confirmed the status: inactive. Everything was fine while it was on the 2.4, but as soon as it (the Mac mini) switched over to the 5, the problem with instability/reconnects/slowness returned.

FWIW, I opened a support ticket with Apple on Jan 25 with a follow-up call about an hour ago. After updating them on the behavior between 2.4 & 5, they asked if I was on OS 13.2. I confirmed that I was and his response was that it is a hardware issue. He said the latest release would have fixed things if it were software related. They've issue a replacement order, so fingers crossed that one is good.

My Mac Mini M2 8GB memory/512GB SSD kept disconnecting from the WiFi I have at home. My other Apple devices Macbook Pro M1, iPad, etc. had NO such issue. Conversation with Apple tech support was no help. I returned it for a refund reluctantly.

Tried this and it didn't help for me. 60 -70 Mbps downloads on wifi when it works. Turn off and go ethernet 855Mbps. Will try reboot. But for so many having same issue alarm bells at corporate should be going off. Bought 1/30/23 honestly wouldn't have spent 1300 if I had known.

This worked for me, I have a Deco mesh router which combines all bands under one SSID. So to test this solution I connected a mini router that I use for travelling which does separate 2.4 Ghz and 5Ghz signals, connecting the new Mac mini M2 to this router fixed the issue, no packet loss and strong signal.

Pretty amazing that Apple didn't fix this one yet.

While this was the solution for me, unfortunately it does not persist through a restart and toggles back on periodically also.

The problem seems to be that Apples Wireless Direct interface hijacks your wifi to speak to other Apple devices around it, this causes the jitters and slowdowns.

One potential fix is putting your wifi channel on the same channel as the Apple Wireless Direct network, which is for 5GHZ - channel 44 in EU and 149 in US. This way the device wont have to switch channels when it uses the apple direct network interfaces.

Second potential solution is turning off services which use this Apple Wireless Direct Network, like Handoff, AirDrop and broadcasting as an Airplay receiver.

I tested both of these ''fixes'' and they seem to improve wifi availability and performance a lot for me. I still hope Apple fixes their terrible wifi performance so we don't have to resort to this.

This! This is the answer!! Changing wifi channel to channel 149 solves the issues!

But here's the rub, I have a dual 5ghz band router with both bands under a single SSID. When the Mac connects to the band I set to channel 149 everything is good. When it connects to the other band wifi is trash again. I'd like to keep the single SSID for other devices that have better wifi implementations than the mini. Is there any way to force the mini to use the band on channel 149? You used to be able to "sudo/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport --channel=NUMBER" but that does not work in Ventura. Is there any alternate way to force the Mac to use that band/channel?

I tried speaking with AppleCare but all they had to offer was that I should talk to my ISP... I have my own router that I can administer. I do not need to talk to my ISP about anything. This thread seems to have better research info on the topic than AppleCare unfortunately, so maybe someone here knows the answer.

Edit: One caveat, using channel 149 seems to also make airdrop non-functional. Not ideal having to choose between having internet or having air drop.

I have the m2 as well but my wifi seems to be working fine. I get 950 mbps at my router and then when I run a speed test on m2 it gets about 700 mbps. Not as good as connected by ethernet.....but still good!

I had (past tense!) the same problems described by others here, on my brand new Mac Mini M2 Pro which I installed as a clean brand new machine, not transferring anything from my other Macs or backups. The WiFi reception was extremely bad. I tested it with three different routers and all sorts of combinations of settings, standards and channels. I live in an area with a lot of WiFi networks and my brand new Mac could at the best of times see only 4 of them, not even all of my own. At the same time my old Mac Mini (late 2012) as well as my iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, three Windows PCs, heck even the dishwasher! could see the whole jungle without problems. On my Gigabit internet connection I scarcely reached 10 Mbps downloads on the only connection that the Mac Mini was able to establish (2.4 GHz band on one of the routers). I have read carefully though this thread and quite a few others, tried all that was suggested there plus a lot of other different approaches (I am somewhat of a networking expert), all to no avail.

At the same time, probably because of the WiFi malfunction, I could not see my iPad and iPhone in the Finder without connecting them with cable, nor could I benefit from the Continuity function on the iPhone to use it as camera/mic in FaceTime.

Then, after the nth reboot of the new Mac suddenly all fell into place and started functioning as expected, without me having changed any of the default settings. I can still not see all the many neighboring networks that I do see on other machines, but at least I can see all of mine and I have a decent WiFi connection speed.

So, maybe it's like in so many Hollywood comedies - turn it off and on again (many times) :-)

Come to think of it, multiple restaurants may have fixed that issues for me as well. I thought splitting the bands fixed the issue. But after posting on this thread I was contacted directly by Apple and after a lengthy conversation about what I did, what router I have and it’s firmware version, etc, he wanted me to recreate the issue. So I combined the 5GHz and 6GHz bands to a single SSID name (wifi name). The issue never came back, and it is working perfectly (knock on wood).

Same issue here. It seems to have gotten worse over time. WiFi is now entirely unusable and I need to reset my router every time the mini comes out of sleep mode for the wires to work. Everything else on my network is working fine.

Same happened here. When I first installed it the m2 mac mini downloaded an entire 3.6gb macos 13.2 update file no problem. And then after rebooting it slowed to a crawl. Disgrace for apple to ship a product on this caliber with this kind of wifi. Seems to be a software issue and they need to fix it soon.

Just a heads to everyone running into this issue.

I tried everything thing on this discussion board but nothing solved the issue. It appears to be intermittent as I ran pings and would experience packet loss or heavy latency but sometimes it would run fine.

I was not able to resolve this issue but did work with Apple support and they will be sending me a replacement as I just received my Mac mini m2 pro on Tuesday.

For anyone who returned and received a replacement, did the replacement work any differently? Just curious if its a hardware issue or software issue. If the replacements worked on the same wifi where the initial minis didn't then maybe it is defective hardware in some units. If the replacements have the same issues then maybe it is software related (or a hardware defect in all units). Just curious since I am trying to decide whether to return mine.

For the time being it seems as if I found a solution today with an employee of the Apple Store Düsseldorf. At his suggestion, I simply changed the HDMI cable to the monitor. So far, 5GHz has been running without any problems or drops in speed.