Instant Hotspot / Personal Hotspot Not Functioning Correctly

I wouldn't want to log out from iCloud on my mac

And found another solution:

I've reset my network settings on my iPhone

Created new user account on my Mac

Turned on hotspot on iPhone

Connected Mac to iPhone's Hotspot

Switched back to my previous user account on Mac

REminds me the days of windows xp when microsoft used to be on the top and users had to do such quirks to get it to work!

the answer lies in this

https://support.apple.com/en-my/HT203302

Hmmm, a document that tells you to check every setting and if it doesn't work, erase and restore your phone?

Real helpful. They really went out of their way to understand the problem.

My issue got resolved because I got the new iPhone.

Still don't know what it was.

I am guessing something to do with bluetooth and device names but I am not sure.

Just exhaust all the options before losing your icloud settings like it was suggested here.

This issue appears to be resolved for me now. Over the last few weeks, running iOS 9.1 on my iPad (with cellular data plan) and my iPhone and El Cap 10.11.1 on my Macbook Pro, I've been able to consistently connect via Mobile Hotspot. What a wondrous thing it is to be able to get online with my Mac with my iPad still in my bag or my iPhone still in my pocket.

I had tried many of the tips in here including resetting, renaming, etc. Some of them would work for a time and then stop. Lately, however, I noticed everything started working the way it was supposed to.

This somewhat echoes what I see. When the phone is listed under "Personal Hotspot" it will fail to connect almost every time (the possible exception being if I have very recently rebooted my iPhone). When the phone is listed beneath this and I am on the Personal Hotspot settings page on the phone (which I am through habit of this never actually working) I get an immediate connection. When the phone is listed "above the line" (so to speak) I switch briefly to Airplane mode and/or toggle WiFi on the Mac so as to then catch it listed "below the line" which then connects.

The net result is that the only functionality actually delivered by the "automatic" Personal Hotspot "feature" is annoyance when trying bypass this feature in order to successfully connect.

Oh, and my OS X on MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013), and iOS on iPhone 6s are fully patched.

Sometimes after things are restarted it works as advertised but after a bit it always seems to return to the same level of non-functionality. Go Apple!

1. Open Keychain Access.
2. From the Edit menu, choose Change Password for Keychain "login."
3. Type the former password of the account that you are currently logged in to, then click OK.
4. If you entered the correct password, a new window appears; enter the original password again in the Current Password field.
5. In the New Password field, type the password that matches your current account password.
6. Re-enter the newer password in the Verify field, then click OK.
7. REBOOT!!

Unexpectedly, after having reset three times my IPhone in vain, this fixed the problem for me. I have an iPhone 6 Plus (iOS 9.2) and the instant hotspot was not showing for two different Mac Books with OS X 10.11.2, but was for an iPad air. Thanks Marc!

I tried all of the suggestions in this discussion but none worked - I could connect to the phone, but could not get any internet access. I tried all connection types - wifi, bluetooth and USB cable. In System Preferences > Network I would see that the connection had a "self-assigned IP address" - basically the iPhone was not providing an IP address to enable communication.

Frustratingly the connection worked once with my Windows 7 laptop at work, but not for my Macbook Pro at home, which made me convinced that it was an issue with my Macbook Pro.

In the end I managed to solve the issue by contacting my phone company (O2 in the UK) to double-check that tethering was enabled; they realised that it wasn't and made a change at their end - next morning I noticed the phone had no data connection. I rebooted the phone, the data connection came back, and internet tethering is now immediate - connection time is less than a second.

Hope this helps - it's worth double-checking with your phone company before trying the steps in this discussion.

I got this to work by disabling Bluetooth on the Mac. After that the wireless network only showed as a regular Wifi in the list, not in a special "Portable Hotspot" section. You can no longer start the hotspot from your mac and it doesn't show you the signal bars anymore.

But that made it work just as you would expect, every single time you connect.

I am using a early 2015 MacBook Pro 13inch Retina.

This feature stopped working for me sometime last fall. In retrospect I realize that it stopped working when I upgraded to iOS 9 / El Capitan, however I wasn't aware of this until just recently.

After suffering with it not working for the better part of a year, I recently upgraded to to macOS Sierra and iOS 10. However, despite my hopes that it'd be fixed, the feature still failed to work.

What fixed it for me was moving from "Two Step Authentication" (2SA) on my iCloud account to "Two Factor Authentication" (2FA). Apple has a nice support document on the differences and how to set 2FA up, here:

Two-factor authentication for Apple ID - Apple Support

(I had to switch authentication methods to enable WATCH auto unlock feature which only works with 2FA).

Hope this helps someone!