New in OS X: Get MacRumors Push Notifications on your Mac

Resubscribe Now Close

Some OS X Yosemite Users Plagued With Wi-Fi Connection Issues

Thursday October 30, 2014 11:43 am PDT by Juli Clover
os_x_yosemite_round_iconSince OS X Yosemite's October 16 launch, MacRumors has been receiving a number of complaints from users who have been experiencing Wi-Fi issues. Extensive threads about Wi-Fi problems have surfaced on both the MacRumors forums and on Apple's own Support Communities as well, suggesting there are quite a few users who are seeing Wi-Fi connection issues after installing Yosemite.

According to the complaints, Wi-Fi connections are sometimes extremely slow, resulting in long loading times, and in some cases, users are seeing their Wi-Fi connections disconnect continually after just a few minutes of being connected.
Since upgrading to Yosemite, my previously-stable (with Mavericks) wifi connection keeps dropping. I have to click the wifi icon and re-select my network every minute or two. I have turned off bluetooth and uninstalled/reinstalled wifi and my networks. I have rebooted multiple times. No luck so far. It appears that others are having similar problems.
The problems appear to be affecting a wide range of different MacBooks, different routers, and users in different locations. A number of different fixes have been suggested on various forums, but it does not appear that any one solution works for everyone, suggesting there may be an issue with Yosemite that needs to be addressed in a future update.

Some users have had luck disabling Bluetooth, turning off Handoff, creating new Network Locations, doing a clean Yosemite install, setting a router to "G-mode only," turning off Dropbox syncing, disabling WPA router encryption, or turning off all proxies in Network preferences, but other users have not been able to solve their Wi-Fi problems at all even attempting all of the above listed solutions. Swapping to a 2.4GHz band has, however, worked for a large number of users.

Apple support representatives have supplied users with different solutions that have included removing excess preferred networks in the Network section of System Preferences and resetting the System Management Controller.

OS X Daily has written an in-depth tutorial on how to fix the Wi-Fi problems in OS X Yosemite, which involves several steps like deleting preference files, creating custom DNS settings, and refreshing the discoveryd service, but for users who can't find a fix, the site recommends downgrading to OS X Mavericks until Yosemite is updated.

Users attempting any of the highly technical fixes above should make a Time Machine backup ahead of time and use caution when deleting any system files. Thus far, there is no word on when a Yosemite update might come as Apple has not yet released any betas to developers.

[ 374 comments ]

Top Rated Comments

(View all)

Avatar
eknkc
65 months ago
How do they manage to break WiFi every single time?
Rating: 44 Votes
Avatar
RoelJuun
65 months ago
Apple and Wi-Fi issues, a never ending story.
Rating: 33 Votes
Avatar
ValSalva
65 months ago
This yearly OS update schedule is going just great :rolleyes:
Rating: 27 Votes
Avatar
tattooedyuppie
65 months ago

How do they manage to break WiFi every single time?


That's what they meant by "Continuity".
Rating: 20 Votes
Avatar
penajmz
65 months ago
Yup. I'm affected as well. Drops all the time, when waking up the computer I usually have to turn wifi off and on for it to work correctly too. I have a rMBP.
Rating: 10 Votes
Avatar
TouchMint.com
65 months ago
Have not noticed on my air or imac so maybe I'm lucky :)
Rating: 9 Votes
Avatar
astroturfme
65 months ago
Sack them all..

Apple needs to completely sack the team responsible for wifi and start from scratch. These chronic issues plaguing both ios/osx is becoming ridiculous. We are dealing with a finite number of variables here in both hardware and software, unlike windows, so there's absolutely NO EXCUSE for this to be happening on every release.
Rating: 8 Votes
Avatar
Rogifan
65 months ago
Obviously Tim is more concerned about writing coming out letters than fixing issues like this. iOS 8.1 still has wifi issues too. :rolleyes:
Rating: 7 Votes
Avatar
Thermonuclear
65 months ago
Priorities

I'm sure that Apple and it's $155 billion in cash would like to thank each and every one of their unpaid beta testers for bug detection. Keep it up, because this money saved by Apple can be used in their continuing efforts to design new color and case combinations for the Apple Watch and ever more fashionable icon design for OS/X. A company just has to have its priorities, and you ain't one of them.
Rating: 7 Votes
Avatar
allanfries
65 months ago
I say go back to releasing a new OS X every 2 years. Maybe it will come out the way it should. :rolleyes:
Rating: 7 Votes

[ Read All Comments ]