All of my devices forget all wifi passwords about once a week

I have:

MacOS High Sierra

MacOS Ventura

iOS 16.5.1(c)

At one time, my MacOS High Sierra merely went to sleep, and upon waking, forgot the password of the WiFi to which it was just connected to for the previous 2 hours, this prompting me to re-enter the password

Dear Kherberos,

I echo the comments of Kotma.

I am a physician working in multiple clinics, using Electrionic Health Record in cloud storage for patient encounters, accessing through different WiFi networks at different urgent care clinics.

How would you like to see your doctor using a state-of-the-art Apple MAcBook, struggling to connect to WiFi, unable to see your EHR, or be disconnected in the midst of recording your clinical findings or in the midst sendig your eRx to the pharmacy?

I don't think you would consider that a very professional encounter, if your physician delays your visit, makes you wait a long time, trying to get something simple done, all because the WiFi keeps asking your physician for the password, and each clinic has a different IT person.

You should be sympathetic to all Apple end-users who are victims of this issue. Try to add something constructive to this discussion. Perhaps you can call Apple and add to our collective voice on this issue.

… I was obviously in the mood for some flaming (but respectful ! 😉) replies when I posted my message.

It never fails 🤣🤣

The point is another user in this thread already commented that Apple is well aware of the issue and is working on it.

Just be patient. Report your specific problem and surrounding events and let the engineers work.

If you think high of Apple, just have faith they will correct the issue.

Emotional outburst is not constructive in the engineering world.

Everyone one has their own idea on how long Apple should take to solve this (i.e. Immediately… lol) things are never that simple and there is a lot to do when an issue like this appears, from tracking the root cause, finding a solution that do not not break something else, many many hours of testing and quality control for final release. This is mighty complex.

… And indeed I wouldn’t be happy if my physician quickly brew himself my prescription from plants of his garden just because I scream for an immediate fix.

Let s argue (respectfully) more now ! 🤣🤣🤣

Do we know for sure that this actually is a problem apple is working on? Or are we just assuming apple "knows all"? Because I all but spelled out the problem to my senior support person and rather than saying "yes this is a known issue we're working on" he says "it sounds like a problem with the wifi network".

just upgraded to ios 16.6. maybe that will solve this. will see in a couple of days.

what upsets me is the radio silence from Apple. they should at least publicly acknowledge the issue and at least (if available) suggest an official workaround and / or some idea on how they will fix this. and an assurance that this is not a security vulnaribility. anything with passwords and keychain makes me nervous.

that's what apple used to do - acknowledge problems and let the users know what's going on. for the last year or two, they seem more focused on new emojis and other bells and whistles rather than problems with their core services.

instead, many users on this thread, and many i know personally, had to spend hours with clueless apple care operators who made them turn off and on their routers, asked them to contact their ISPs or system admins for network settings and such, wasting their times, instead of simply publicly acknowledging the problem and asking for our patience whilst demonstrating that they are working diligently on solving it.

anyway, enough venting - please keep posting this on social media - twitter (or X, whatever), linkedin, fb, instagram, tiktok, wherever. these days apple pays attention only if there's bad publicity. just twitted, or X'ed again. if ios 16.6 does not solve this, X'ing will not suffice - will probably have to XXX my feelings!

https://twitter.com/beskardes/status/1683727109800308737?s=46&t=WFAAG7qTByacuhpSsk4ewg

This is actually very constructive info, thanks !

As for Apple communicating on the issue, I feel (only a personal feeling) that yes, they could do a better job in keeping some sort of “public board” with known potential issues.

Although I can also understand also why they wouldn’t want to.

For instance it is not immediately obvious if the issue is linked to a bug or to a hdw problem appearing after some software update. Also not clear if the issue is due to Apple applying established standard protocol (defined between companies i.e for data transfer in wifi) but with a mistake. Or if the standard protocol itself is the problem … in which case you need to start a round of discussion with all contributors of the protocol to request modification of the standard. Or if the issue is link to the Apple side or the router side, or if the issue is only on the Apple kernel layer of software.

So until responsibilities are clearly establish , it is difficult to communicate on the issue. Not impossible though …

I suspect the way it works is simply the “Me too” button , once the number is high enough, it triggers an alert at Apple and depending on the number, the issue (if any is found on Apple side) is assigned a priority and a request to communicate officially on it or not is sent to higher management.

Beskardes nailed it. Apple broke it with an update. And he/she first posted that it related to iOS 16.4 on May 18, three and a half months ago. It's no longer "very constructive" information, it's old news that Apple should have responded to. This problem has been going on for over 4 months.

As to Apple responding to issues they caused by evaluating the "me too" button hits...yeah, they sure do that. They really don't take action unless the problem seems big enough, and enough people are complaining. That's what we're doing here. If you have patience, you don't complain. What good does that do? If everyone were infinitely patient and thought highly of Apple, no problem would ever be reported, never be corrected, and we'd all just live with it forever. The squeeky wheel does get the grease.

I think we'd all be more patient if:

1. We felt, through some form of feedback, that Apple was listening
2. The problem, caused by Apple, could be addressed more quickly
3. The problem wasn't quite such a pain to deal with on a daily (or more) basis
4. The problem wasn't the kind that could literally prevent work and business from being conducted

This all contributes positively or negatively to the experience of using Apple products.

Yes frustration is high on this but you make a lot of assumptions which maybe misleading in solving the issue.

Beskardes makes a very good argument which seems technically sound … but it is still only conjecture.

Also assuming that apple knew since 4 months because of Reddit is just an assumption.

Think about it, what would you do if you were allowed to sit in the meeting room with all the Apple engineers discussing the issue and throwing back and forth argument or possible solutions ? Probably only showing that it will take time to solve … Would you yell at them ? What good would this do ?

I agree that communication on the issue is a must. We have the post of Carlos Perez2 indirectly giving some info on what apple is doing. Enough for me to wait a little more. Everyone sensibilities are obviously different.

On my side I am checking this thread to (happily) see the “Me Too” counter increasing … and having some fun (and respectful ! 😉) arguments. Until the issue is solved !

When there is a security issue, they are able to fix it really quickly. I am not from IT but the fact that they can fix security issues immediately makes me think that your argument that it takes months to fix this may not be that accurate. This is likely less of a security issue, and more of a convenience thing, but it still should get higher priority, especially since some of us are unable to log in at work.

Also, I agree with you asking for respectful discussion here. Full agreement. But then you said that some people reacted with flame to your arguments. Well, “the flame” started after you said that so many of us are “over reacting”, and we should be patiently waiting. We have have been, for months, but enough is enough. If Apple at least acknowledged that they are aware and working on it.

Respectfully, peace.

Apple Support phoned me out of the blue today (in Australia!) to discuss this issue with me. The lady said they are aware of the problem and are calling as many people as possible on this thread to try and get to the bottom of it.

I’ve tried disabling keychain sync but it doesn’t work on neither off my devices (MacBook, iMac, iPad, IPhone) the toggle thinks for a few secs then goes back to enabled, I have tried what people said about resetting which didn’t work on any device.

im royally screwed and paying now 30% more for iCloud.

now considering moving all my photos to Amazon photos and cancelling.

Apple not even showing face around here is dismal.

Not sure why I suspect that Apple is undercover here saying engineers are working on it. Relax!

they haven’t shown official face because they know many folks here will go ape on them.

FFS I cannot even disable keychain as it gets re enabled on ALL MY DEVICES.

APPLE IF YOU ARE READING THIS!!! WE KNOW YOU ARE, GET IT SORTED!!!

Ha. Nope, though I did work with a well known brand that is a close partner of Apple and I've worked on many products that use Apple technology to work with Apple ecosystems. So I've just seen inside workings through those periods. On a personal level I've had pretty solid support from Apple over all the years. Much better run than any other tech company - ever. Nothing is perfect given the insane complexity of dealing with all the Apple products being used, but the systems and people they have for pretty much everything is miles ahead of everyone else. I'm not a crazy fanboy - truly in a business, operations, and customer sense it's very impressive. It just takes time to sort these things.

This is happening to me since updating my iphone (Mac still running nicely on High Sierra). Ever since the update, every few days my wifi passwords get wiped from both devices, despite being a preferred network. What is really confusing for me is that it clears not only the icloud saved password, but the system saved password as well.

Please don't tell me about signing in and out again. This is clearly a deeper rooted issue that you ought to figure out.

Just got back to my London home after nine days away and all three of my devices – MacBook, iPhone and iPad – have reconnected to the wifi without asking me for the password. First time this has happened in at least six months.

Anyone else finding the problem has gone away?