Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
not looking good for Foxconn right now...i assume some heads there shall roll..

It's down to Apple to design & test before shipping to customers.

----------

The reason is the vast amount of routers out there, each with its own quirks or standards breaches. Testing for them all is nearly impossible. I'd be surprised if this was mostly an Apple issue.

The new Sony Vaio Pro had Wi-Fi issues, it was fixed with a driver update.
 
Time for all the NAYSAYERS in previous threads to eat a LARGE and well-deserved helping of crow.

I'm always amazed at how hard some kool-aid drinkers would defend Apple when evidence clearly points to the contrary.
 
Why are whiners always whining when stuff doesn't work?
As long as it just works insanely great eventually.
Someday.
 
This happens every time they release new hardware and software. I've learnt through experience never to be an early adopter with any new Apple products. Better to wait until someone discovers all the problems and Apple eventually fixes them. Apple QC is appalling.

I was going to buy the 13" model this week as I'd not heard any bad reports until today. Glad I waited now.
 
I have the MBA 2013 11" but had no issues so far.

I also bought the new airport a week later to benefit from ac but no issues so far. What I also noticed is that people have slower harddrives who had the first batch.

When I did the black magic speed test, the speed was 100MB/s higher than the people who ran the test on the MBA's they bought from the store.

Mine came straight from China, so maybe they are already adjusting certain things.
 
I've learnt through experience never to be an early adopter with any new Apple products. Better to wait until someone discovers all the problems and Apple eventually fixes them. Apple QC is appalling.

Rarely do any tech products these days, Apple or others, not ship with some sort of bug or glitch. I have Denon receivers that have received new firmware updates almost bi-monthly that were nothing but bug fixes.

Every tech product, even minor updates like, say, the iPhone 4 to 4S, still have all new parts, and are essentially brand new products. That said, being an early adopter isn't for everyone. Some (like me) take the risk of bugs as a trade for having the latest and greatest. Others prefer using last gen products, even if they miss out on certain features, as they value stability more than anything else.

So it's not universally "better" to wait. It just depends on one's personality and needs.
 
I have an I7/8gb/512 that is now 4 days old.

3 Wifi networks tested sofar (2 x G, 1 x N), they all work on iPhone btw.
2 of them work fine on the Air, the 3rd one does not and shows the same symptom as described in the article. The failing one is a wrt54g2 with (I assume) old firmware.
 
My one week old MB Air works perfectly and after an hour of email and surfing, tells me I still have 18:09 left on the battery. I'm one very happy camper.
 
Got my 13in 256GB SSD model from the Apple store yesterday. I have only used it on my network at home but so far zero problems. I have a Netgear 802.11N router. Not one disconnect and I have been using this thing LOTS. Also my batter is at 47 percent which is just friggin awesome!
 
WIFI has allways been a bloody mess, every chip and manufacture has differences. The full has allways been in the trade to keep the adapter and AP to the same make and genneration. Ideally same chipset family to get the best performance. Yes using different makes works but you will never get problem free usage with every make and model.

It's not just apple these things affect its everyone.
 
Oh?

Considering we have a whole company using Apple products (iOS and Macs) and pretty much everyone connects to Wi-Fi all day long while working, I'd say we haven't really seen any of these "serious Wi-Fi issues".

Our family has owned quite a few Apple products over the last decade too, and again? No real Wi-Fi issues to speak of.

If you can prove wireless malfunctions often enough to easily demonstrate it in an Apple store, then sure -- it should be addressed. It can be things as simple as an antenna coming disconnected inside, or a wireless radio that's simply burning out. (Heck, I saw older D-Link routers all the time that would technically keep functioning, yet the radio in them got so weak, you only got a wireless connection to it when holding the computer less than a foot from the unit. It happens ....)

But IMO, the idea that Apple is any worse at doing Wi-Fi than the competition just isn't true. What is true is that Apple likes to use the latest tech for wireless in its new products. That means yes, you'll find some compatibility issues with older (especially non Apple) gear out there. They offered people wireless "n" when the industry was still using mostly "g", and now "ac" when barely anyone else has it yet. That's just the price of staying on the cutting edge though.


That's just funny.

Apple have serious Wi-Fi issues with products for over 4 years. The past response has been tough luck, deal with it. Even when you prove it infront of the staff in store.

I would imagine there will be many angry MacBook, MacBookPro owners when they see this.
 
Time for all the NAYSAYERS in previous threads to eat a LARGE and well-deserved helping of crow.

I'm always amazed at how hard some kool-aid drinkers would defend Apple when evidence clearly points to the contrary.

There is no 'points clearly'going on here. There's plenty of reports to back up that this isn't every unit which strongly suggests its not a design flaw or even bad batch of cards type issue. We haven't seen details on what routers are being used and whether they are up to date in spec or software, what other devices are on the network and so on.
 
Probably just having an issue with a very small range of routers.

There's so many routers out there, there's no way you could expect them to realistically test against all iterations of all routers in the world.

I'd expect once they get the macs and identify what routers they connected to, they'll buy a few, work out the oddity, do a bit of code hacking and everything will work happily after a small update.
 
Ok, to be fair I don't who is really to blame here - whether it's router manufacturers who don't implement the G, N, AC standards properly or whether it's Apple themselves.

It's hard to believe that these are actually standards considering the shocking problems with connectivity.

Little bit from Column A, little bit from Column B.

I've had a range of problems with various device connectivity in and around my business on any AC router I've tried -- Linksys, D-Link, ASUS. Perfect 5-bar signals anywhere on campus, but intermittent dropouts and disconnects that no single troubleshoot seems able to isolate. The Apple AEBS is only N but it works -- but only in bridge mode because of how business cablemodems work in our area, so no internal guest network. And even the N routers that do support guest networks get overloaded when I turn it on, so I ended up adding an IP and switching before our internal backbone and branching out a G router SOLELY for guests. No single solution has worked reliably every time except ethernet, and that has the obvious drawback of mooring your terminal to the spot and not working with iPads, which we have both as checkout lanes and staff PDAs.

Apple, as much as any other manufacturer, is using commodity chipsets for networking. OK maybe they pick the best set out there. It's still not that much better than the worst set out there. That's the nature of a commodity component.

For as much as we're networked these days, I agree, you'd think this kind of thing would be better solved by now.
 
Hm... I will get my MBA on 4th of July in Germany.

After that I will buy a new router as well to benefit from AC.

Due to the fact that my neighbors have like ~30 wireless networks at 2,4ghz , my macbook has no wifi 10 meters away from the router.

So I hope with the new Airport Extreme or Asus RT-AC66U AC1750 or TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750 my connection problems will be fixed, as 5 Ghz band has less interference problems and AC gives me very high transferrate over WIFI

Wifi problems due to the MBA would be fatal...

Anybody from Europe with wifi issues yet?


btw there is also an Haswell Chips error with USB 3 ports after wake up, anybody knows anything about that with the MBA yet?
 
Last edited:
My 2012 MacBook Air is looking better all the time.

I was thinking the same thing about mine. This problem brings back bad memories of the three 2009 MacBook Pro's I had. After six months and countless hours on the phone with Apple, it was futile.

However there's always good news with the bad. It taught me to beware of Apples haste in getting products to market before they're fully tested. Especially now that iOS is Apples main focus.

To compound the issue of it not working, is the extremely high amount of pressure on Apple to revive its declining stock price. Out of nothing more than a lucky guess, I sold much of my Apple stock in Sep last year as it hit $700, yet in contrast today's price of $400 is discouraging. Especially as I watch my Google stock climb to nearly $1,000 per share, I'd sure like to see Apple get back on track.

It's rather ironic that in just a matter of months Apples Wall Street performance has been usurped by Google's brilliant run. As of late the increase in Googles popularity has been the best news yet, as the industry relies on competition to drive innovation. It's working too as we see Apple wake up and begin to incorporate some of Androids best features in iOS 7.

----------

WIFI has allways been a bloody mess, every chip and manufacture has differences. The full has allways been in the trade to keep the adapter and AP to the same make and genneration. Ideally same chipset family to get the best performance. Yes using different makes works but you will never get problem free usage with every make and model.

It's not just apple these things affect its everyone.

Actually many PC makers like Lenovo, HP & Dell have delivered excellent wifi connectivity. My ThinkPads I use, in concert with my MBP & MBA models, have been 100% reliable. ThinkPad wifi is never an issue.
 
Considering we have a whole company using Apple products (iOS and Macs) and pretty much everyone connects to Wi-Fi all day long while working, I'd say we haven't really seen any of these "serious Wi-Fi issues".

Our family has owned quite a few Apple products over the last decade too, and again? No real Wi-Fi issues to speak of.

If you can prove wireless malfunctions often enough to easily demonstrate it in an Apple store, then sure -- it should be addressed. It can be things as simple as an antenna coming disconnected inside, or a wireless radio that's simply burning out. (Heck, I saw older D-Link routers all the time that would technically keep functioning, yet the radio in them got so weak, you only got a wireless connection to it when holding the computer less than a foot from the unit. It happens ....)

But IMO, the idea that Apple is any worse at doing Wi-Fi than the competition just isn't true. What is true is that Apple likes to use the latest tech for wireless in its new products. That means yes, you'll find some compatibility issues with older (especially non Apple) gear out there. They offered people wireless "n" when the industry was still using mostly "g", and now "ac" when barely anyone else has it yet. That's just the price of staying on the cutting edge though.


It looks like your family and company (is the same thing?) both are using Apple products exclusively. So you probably have Apple routers. It would be really strange it Apple did not test their laptops with their own routers. The claim that Apple is ahead of the pack in adopting "ac" may only come from Apple fan. "ac" gear outside Apple universe was available for quite a while. As usual Apple was one of the last to adopt it. To add insult to injury, AnandTech discovered that OS/X can't actually use "ac" speeds to full potential (far from it) when transferring the files (the only operation that really matters in this context).
 
over the past 2-3 years, I have noticed that Apple hasn't released a single mac without defect (hardware or software)

isn't too hard to test it before selling it ? :rolleyes:
 
Duh!

:confused:

So if this is not a hardware issue, why does Apple need the "problematic units" to study?

Why wouldn't they? How can Apple find a solution when they're not seeing the problem themselves? I think Apple is doing the right thing by getting a hold of these laptops that are having issues. They can test both the hardware and software. Apple doesn't let a problem go away- they find solutions so they can take care of their customers. I just received my new MBAir i7, 8gm, 256gb, 11" inch screen and I only had one issue when I was downloading my purchased Apps from the App Store AND Adobe CC software. When my MBAir was downloading, it would lose connection when it went to sleep. I rebooted and I haven't lost any wifi connection. I'm using the new Airport and it works fine. I do have questions about download speed though since its using the new AC technology.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.