New MacBook Airs may suffer from Wi-Fi connectivity issues | Hacker News Reader

New MacBook Airs may suffer from Wi-Fi connectivity issues

arstechnica.com

42 pointszokier43 comments

I use an iPhone 4 and Macbook Air as my main devices.

One of the first comments on the Ars Technica page is "you're holding it wrong". It's a predictable joke, but I'll begrudgingly admit that I laughed.

Or, more likely, it's a few people who got dud hardware or are misdiagnosing marginal WiFi coverage and some tech “reporters” acting as an echo chamber to amplify it. This is a couple of forum posts run through Gizmodo and (disappointingly) ArsTechnica – i.e. the plural of anecdote.

OTOH, Apple is renowned for keeping hardware problems on the down-low and quietly swapping things out with no questions when people come in to complain. The only way this kind of thing gets out is through forum complaints and such.

swapping things out with no questions

Is also known as excellent customer service. Hardware will always have issues - no defect rate is 0%. How the manufacturer responds to those issues is what determines excellency.

> OTOH, Apple is renowned for keeping hardware problems on the down-low

Renowned on forums. I've received recalls for widespread problems (batteries, a video problem in the PowerBook G4 era, etc.) but many of the forum / mac blog fodder seem more like selection bias – people who don't have a particular hardware problem don't tend to search for threads so they can say “Nope, works fine here”.

My MacBook Air fell into the camp smackfu is talking about. Big thread on the Apple website about the problem, no public acknowledgement of it from Apple. However, when I brought my out-of-warranty laptop in, they replaced the faulty parts free of charge. I ended up pleasantly surprised, and will buy Apple again in the future.

Most businesses do everything they can to get out of warranties. Apple seems more like a high value add business to me now, and less a seller of commodities like many of the other computer manufacturers.

Yeah, a relative had that with an iPhone 5 charger cable: walked into the store and the tech simply reached onto the shelf and gave him a new one. No waiting, filling out a 3 page form, 6 forms of ID, etc. Completely changed the mood from griping to “Wow, I'll buy from Apple again” – quite a contrast to the rest of the computer industry which is generally chasing Walmart down the short-term cost minimization rabbit hole.

You may fault Apple all you want for various decisions, but they are very good when it comes to product replacement. My iPhone 5 had a faulty screen (it just conked out one day.) Within 3 days I had a brand new one on my table having not walked into an Apple store and opting for pickup instead.

> quietly swapping things out with no questions when people come in to complain.

Your tone makes this sound like a bad thing. Isn't this exactly what you would want the company making your hardware to do? In what way is the typical alternative (a gauntlet of ignorant script-jockeys) preferable?

I have had an issue both with my previous mac, a second gen air and a first gen pro retina with sustaining a connection (I am immediately next to the wifi router and get wifi drop outs yet my colleague, a distance away using a PC, has no dropouts whatsoever.)

I also have a curious problem that has affected both of them - if I rest the laptop on my naked chest, the wifi connection degrades to the point that connectivity is significantly affected, and if the signal is not strong enough completely drops out. Seems to me to be related to the aluminium case. Quite frustrating as this is (an arguably not very healthy) common use case for me :)

1) Have you tested moving away from the AP/router? I'd suggest that if you can pin it down to a specific situation, you can a) give the "Geniuses®" something to repair and/or b) find a workaround that works for you.

2) Have you forgotten about the metal plate in your chest? ;-)

I ended up running a script on launch that pings 127.0.0.1 every 5 seconds - my Wifi was disconnecting every few minutes and this has fixed the problem for the last 6 months for me.

edit: actually pinging the router, 192.168.1.1 etc. Script is:

#! /bin/sh

ping 192.168.1.1 > /dev/null 2>&1

That makes no sense what so ever.

Pinging your loopback address just shows that your localhost is still there.

If you were to write a script that instead pulled the local IPv4 address you are getting - that might be a little more sensical?

On Linux, that packet wouldn't leave the device either. You have to ping another host on your subnet or the kernel won't queue the packet for transmission on a hardware network interface.

Interesting, will give that a go when next I notice it happening (it's intermittent for me too which is good + bad... hard to repro :)

I get exactly the same thing with the chest. But put it on a blanket and it overheats. Arg.

Finally! Somebody who shares my pain! :-)

I have owned several Macbook[Pros|Airs] over the years and consistently the biggest issue has been poor wifi. Either dropping or just being generally crappy performance wise compared to other systems right next to me on the same next work. It is annoying that it is still an issue several years later.

Same here. When Lion came out it was the worst. (always used quality APs).

I love my MacBooks, but every one I have had (totally three so far) have had wifi connectivity issues, usually which involve the connection dropping a few minutes after I resume from sleep and me needing to disable wifi and reconnect.

I love my MacBooks too, and in OSX I had this problem with some APs but not others. Hardware compatibility is hard, I think the only thing you can rely on is that everyone tests on Windows...

> Hardware compatibility is hard That's definitely it. I also think it's made worse by the lack of tools to troubleshoot the issue.

Have you tried the built-in network diagnostics? There's even a shortcut: Option-click on the wifi menu bar item.

I'm using one of the new MacBook Airs and I've yet to experience this (although of course, I'm just one data point).

Ditto. For what it's worth I've only connected via 802.11n so far, so it could be an issue with a/b/g.

for that matter it could be an 802.11ac problem as that is brand new with the Mac line in general.

Same here. On N.

Been using the new 11" for days. No problems with WiFi, but I have noted a few recurring themes about WiFi connectivity.

802.11 b still works pretty well for most people.

802.11 g has better in-house or building range than 802.11 n

802.11 n can be faster. but I haven't notice that being true...ever.

5 Ghz spectrum connections sucks at penetrating walls.

You're confusing a few key points. 802.11n can operate on both 2.4 & 5Ghz networks. So while you state speed and range metrics the real question is the quality, capability and environmentals you're, likely, not taking into consideration.

Quality: not all antenna or radios are at all equal. Just because you have an N capable AP means nothing for client connectivity.

Capability: Is your AP MIMO? How many TX & RX? These things matter. Many of Apple's designs for Airport look pretty but are effectively junk for RF performance. This has always been a clear case of aesthetic over function. Many people often buy all in one devices to handle 30�Mbps Internet connections and also lump in 10� wireless and wired devices. These wireless 'enabled' devices are often horrible since they're often underpowered to handle the increased connection speeds as local transfer and Internet speeds increase.

Environmentals: Do you live in a shared living space with lots of neighbors contending for use of channels? Do you live in a 4000+ sqft house and have your AP in the basement? Etc...

TL;DR I look at this stuff in a lab on a daily basis. This generalization is quite bad.

>Many of Apple's designs for Airport look pretty but are effectively junk for RF performance.

Interesting. You say "many". So which Airport models would you suggest?

I have wifi problems with my MacBook Pro retina since I bought it. It's probably a recurring software issue.

I used to do a lot of audio and video editing and the releases of OSX always seemed to have problems on launch day so much so that people in the industry always suggested to wait for the .1 release. Over the same time you've seen similar problems in apple's hardware. "It's mostly alright but some people are getting yellow cinema displays" "wi-fi connectivity issues" "a few models were XYZ" perhaps the same policy should be applied to hardware. Wait a month until they get the kinks worked out and you'll be rocking and rolling.

The same policy should definitely be applied to hardware. It's fairly common knowledge in the Apple community not to buy the first version of any new hardware unless you want to experience all the highs and lows of the bleeding edge.

On the other hand, it's hard to say what constitutes a ".1" in the hardware. The latest Air is a relatively small revision to the current Air line that's been around for a few years now, so I wouldn't have treated it as something brand new like I would have with, say, the original Air from 2008, or the redesigned one from 2010.

But yes, if you're not in a big hurry and don't want to risk a fight with the hardware, just wait a month or so after any given release.

  | It's fairly common knowledge in the Apple community

Since at least the PowerPC days.

The latest Air is a relatively small revision to the current Air line that's been around for a few years now

True, but doesn't it have a couple of new parts? (Haswell CPU and WiFi chip that adds AC support as I recall)

This is a recurring theme with new chipsets. I'm sure it'll get cleaned up in firmware/driver updates as usual, but at some point, you'd think Apple would figure out a better QA strategy for wifi.

There's only so much QA you can do - are they going to extensively test with every wifi router and firmware configuration ever made? At some point you have to ship and look at the logs you get back.

Virtually every major update to Apple products results in this problem. This is not true of other manufacturers. Given Apple's unusually large profit margins, there is obvious room for them to improve in this area.

>This is not true of other manufacturers.

This is wrong. They just have smaller runs. A MBP goes --with the same hw configuration-- to 3-4 million people. PC runs are smaller and with tons of different configurations with regards to motherboards/CPU combos for the same vendor.

Also Apple tries newer designs/chips more often. PC manufactures keep at the same older chips for the tons of the low end machines the sell.

So: lot's of different + older (and thus tested) chips in smaller runs == less apparent problems.

Testing with literally "every" router ever made is of course infeasible, but Apple should certainly be testing with a large number. Say, enough to cover 90% of the routers presently in use.

My first gen retina has problems connecting to certain WiFi points. Netstat shows an assigned ip that's out of range, while others continue to receive regular IPs. Renders it useless for helping teach Rails development/googling to find solutions to others' issues.

Waiting for a thin, light, no os laptop that works well with GNU/linux

I've seen the exact same problem on the newest iPads as well. It sucks for development, because every time the wifi connection drops I lose (auto-closes) the window for the remote web development console in Safari.

Features, features everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com