So I bought a 24" iMac a little over a month ago. From day one, I had horrible problems with the wireless dropping out. The Airport status just sits at 'Scanning..." and even pings to my router drop.

Apparently, this is a pretty widespread problem:

http://blog.usweb.com/archives/apple-still-has-not-fixed-leopard-wireless-dropout-problems/
http://installingcats.com/2008/06/06/airport-wireless-connection-drops-on-leopard-10-5-2/
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1394194

I’ve tried just about all of the workarounds listed, but alas none work. I have a 24? 3.06Ghz iMac, and this has been a day one issue. I also have a 17? powerbook G4, a 13? macbook, and two iphones, with both the laptops running leopard 10.5.5, and only have the scanning issue with the iMac.

I originally had an older linksys router, and decided to buy an airport extreme, thinking there was some sort of RF issue between the 802.11n wireless NIC and the older router. Plus i wanted to upgrade to 802.11n and have gigabit ethernet anyway. Well, i have the same problem even with the airport extreme. It’s intermittent, some days, i have no problems, other times, i can’t get even 30 seconds of stable connectivity.

running a ping to my router results in almost total packet loss:

10.0.1.1 ping statistics —
453 packets transmitted, 67 packets received, 85% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.519/170.476/5410.098/850.303 ms

The airport extreme is only 10 feet away. This is driving me crazy. Anyone else run into this?

9/29/2008 6:45:07 PM

apple shares fell 19% today

its just really sad right now

9/29/2008 7:09:44 PM

^that would be pretty much the whole market.

some worse than others.

[Edited on September 29, 2008 at 7:13 PM. Reason : .]

9/29/2008 7:13:04 PM

Bobby, I'd definitely let the Genius Bar look at it. They'll probably swap out the card and/or the antenna.

9/29/2008 8:51:26 PM

Bobby,

I used to work for Apple - they will replace it just take it to them.

9/29/2008 9:10:24 PM

Quote :

"they will replace it just take it to them."

9/29/2008 9:20:36 PM

I'm kinda disappointed to hear you aren't running a 1252 instead...

9/29/2008 10:31:40 PM

^ha, even with the corporate discount, it costs way more.


yeah i may take it by the genius bar, but reading through all of the other reports, i don't believe this is a hardware problem, but i might go ahead anyway just to eliminate that possibility.

9/30/2008 7:05:10 AM

who works at cisco?

9/30/2008 8:07:47 AM

yeah, this is a fairly common problem with leopard... doesn't seem to be hardware-related. happens on pretty much all the intel boxes. seems to happens less frequently if you do a clean install of leopard as opposed to an archive & install or upgrade.

9/30/2008 9:25:14 AM

my roommate had this problem with his macbook when he went to 10.5. I told him windows had received several intel wireless driver updates but I guess apple had none. the weird thing is that it worked fine on nomad (aironet AP's) and other people's houses, mostly. I think the margin for error on IEEE standards in the wifi domain is just a bit too flexible as the protocol's always had a degree of flakiness to it.

9/30/2008 9:37:04 AM

^ I don't think Apple uses Intel wireless chips.

9/30/2008 9:47:16 AM

correct, they use atheros chips

9/30/2008 9:52:48 AM

Bobby I was having issues with this myself a few days ago, although it wasn't exactly the same situation. My iMac (original G5, 2GHz) and my Acer lappy were having issues connecting to my Airport Extreme. After a bit of research on the net I decided to turn off the 'auto' selection for wireless channels -- I just set it to channel 11.

No problems since.

9/30/2008 11:24:09 AM

I've been having this problem myself. I have a MacBook, although I haven't yet upgraded to Leopard, so apparently this is a problem on Tiger also. I haven't taken it by the Genius bar yet, although I may give that a try and see if there's anything they can do.

9/30/2008 11:35:07 AM

^^

yeah one of the first things i tried. no dice.

The only thing that helps is turning the airport interface off and on. but usually it drops off again within 5 minutes or less.

I might just have to tack a long cable along the wall...

9/30/2008 12:55:08 PM

If you make a new user account on your computer and log in to that account, does the issue persist?

9/30/2008 1:11:30 PM

Are you talking about this dropout?

9/30/2008 1:25:54 PM