One odd thing I have noticed on my 14" MBP is that every once in a while, after rebooting the system (usually after macOS updates because mostly that’s the only time I reboot), after several hours of perfectly normal use, the MBP will lose its wifi. It will just show an exclamation mark over a grayed out wifi menu bar symbol. This is on my home wifi which is all Apple (final gen AirPort Extreme) and otherwise rock stable. There appears to be no issues with the wifi on any other devices, just this 14" MBP. And only after it has been recently rebooted, like yesterday because of 12.5. The whole afternoon everything remained peachy after the update, but then this morning no wifi. It must be about the 4th time I’ve seen this happen since I got this MBP last Nov.
When it happens, no amount of turning on/off wifi, reselecting the network, or changing network locations helps. No other clients show any issues. AP Utility connects to the base station (from another Mac only, of course) and reports all looks good, but indeed the 14" is no longer listed as a client. I’ve tried logging out and back in (since Howard Oakley almost had me convinced that very little actually happens in addition when you do a full reboot) but no dice. The only thing that ultimately seems to help, is to just reboot the MBP. Then it will immediately reconnect to my home wifi as if nothing ever happened. Apple Diagnostics reports all peachy which is kind of what you’d expect considering that most of the time access to my home network is great.
Short of drastic stuff like reinstall macOS or trashing my network prefs etc. I’ve tried pretty much everything I can think of. And honestly, at this point it’s more about curiosity than wrestling this to the ground. It happens rather infrequently and can easily be remedied. Any other suggestions for things I could try next time it happens (could be months away)?
Any guesses as to what’s going on here? Is this some kind of odd Monterey bug? It’s almost as if on certain boots, there will after a couple hours be trouble with wifi so then when that happens you reboot again and if you’re lucky on that boot things will remain solid. Until the next reboot and then you roll the dice again. Odd. I was wondering if perhaps it had to do with Apple Silicon network stack, since I never experienced this on the very same wifi with any of my Intel Macs. But then again, my wife has never reported seeing the issue with her M1 MBA (2020 model) so I hesitate to point fingers at the M1—those two machines share a slot of commonality and in terms of network stack are likely identical.
Anyway, anybody ever seen something like this?
