Q: Wireless connection is too weak to unlock with apple watch

Are you using the Applewatch together with an iPhone 5 later?

The unlock feature requires any 2013 and later Mac model running the new macOS Sierra using an Apple Watch running watchOS 3 with an iPhone 5 or later.

I am assumimg your watch is running watchOS 3?

I just got this for the first time today.  It happened 3x and then I opened my phone to run a speed test and confirm my wireless stability.

Speedtest went fine and the next time I tried to unlock via Watch it worked.  I'll post again with any more details, but at this point, my guess is that the phone or watch somehow didn't have a solid wireless connection.

There is still some mystery in how this unlock feature works, but I know from Apple's tech review that they are, literally, timing wireless connections from the Mac to you Watch, dividing by light speed and computing that you are, in fact, next to your Mac and not having your BLE connection hijacked and repeated.

Given all that AppleAchemy™, some ****'s gonna go wrong sometimes :-)

Hope this helps

This has been driving me nuts! I've got a late 2014 iMac retina + iphone 7 + 1st gen watch with watchOS3.. so all the toys.

My wifi seems stable RSSI -55 dBm / Noise -84 dBm

auto-unlock works maybe 25% of the time or else just dumps me back at the password prompt. I've tried selectively switching off both 2.4 and 5ghz wifi (both on same SSID as normally recommended), switching off all advanced ASUS router settings. I also switched off wifi on the iphone and still got same level of success.

So its either a Bluetooth issue between watch and imac or maybe a wifi compability issue.

A couple of other points..

Twice I've seen my apple watch appear in the macos bluetooth device list... most of the time its not there - is this an issue.. do others ALWAYS see their watch listed?

I've can see my watch in the DHCP client list on my router... but am not able to ping it.

Seeing the same problem about once a day, Apple watch v1 is about 36" from MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015).  Have extremely strong wifi connection.  Seems really odd.

And you also have an iPhone turned on while attempting this?

The discussion above already covers the basics... esp this reply:

Re: Wireless connection is too weak to unlock with apple watch

You may need to perform a few resets if the devices are all there

but just not working as expected. See the 'help viewer' for links

to support articles, or a search for more untried information.

Good luck!

I've tried everything including all suggestions from apple support. I've also had apple wifi engineering collect diagnostic logs. From what I can tell there are lots of users suffering from unreliable apple watch auto-unlocking and many (like myself) have probably just given up and switched it off.

Its a good idea and if one-day they can make it work, great.