MacBook Air constantly drops wifi connection

I did some more research, and came up with a temporary solution. Not the best thing to do, but it certainly worked for me. So whoever has the same problem, do this:

  • open Automator, select Application
  • add a Shell Script item
  • enter the following command in it: ping -i 0.2 192.168.1.1 (or whatever the IP of your router is)

Just save the app, start it and let it run. This will prevent your mac from dropping the connection.

The problem is that OS X tries to put the WiFi antenna into a power saving mode if there's no data being sent or received, but with some WiFi APs, this leads to disconnecting. That ping command will ping your router every 0.2 seconds, preventing OS X from turning off the WiFi.

This is not a brilliant solution, but it will work until Apple does something about this.


The WiFi on my iMac kept disconnecting each time the computer went to sleep, about 15 min when computer was not used. I solved it by going to energy saver in system preferences to extend the computer sleep time and unselected the "put the hard disk/s to sleep when possible" The display sleep time doesn't matter, it's the hard drives that should stay awake much longer. It worked for me.


Apple support cleared this up for me. I needed to clear out all wifi networks saved under the preferred networks tab Networks>Advanced>Preferred Wifi Networks - with the exception of the network created to login to our secure office environment. Turns out I had a bunch based on travel, and there may have been one or two my machine favored for some reason. Anyway - this seems to have done the trick. No drops over the past few hours.