Owners of Apple’s 13-inch notebooks are reporting that their Wi-Fi access is much less reliable after installing Mac OS X Leopard or more recent updates to Mac OS X Tiger, especially when the systems switch to battery power, reports Apple Insider
The exact behavior of affected systems can vary slightly, but appears to largely be connected to the computer’s power supply. While the connection remains largely stable when plugged into an AC adapter, switching to battery power renders the wireless link intermittent and in many cases drops network access entirely when idle.
Users often can’t detect nearby networks after restarting the card through software, but can almost always regain a dependable connection after reattaching the power plug. A handful of owners report having to restart the computer to restore the Wi-Fi connection, however.
To date, the intermittent connection issue has not been publicly acknowledged by Apple and affects systems regardless of subsequent Mac OS X updates. Both the recent 10.4.11 update and all current versions of Leopard continue to exhibit the symptoms of the problem, although some note the situation improving for their systems after the most recent upgrades to both Leopard and Tiger.
“Wi-Fi works OK under other OS X releases and also with Windows Vista running on the MacBook hardware,” says one report. “Apple’s engineers need to quit playing with their iPhones, roll up their sleeves and look for bugs.”
In other news, Google Gadgets are coming to Mac reports Om Malik. Google’s new Desktop for Mac will allow you to run Google Gadgets (thus far available on Windows OS only) on OS X-based Apple computers. The application needs 10.4 or higher versions of OS X. The widgets run inside of Apple Dashboard. Many different Google Gadgets are available such as YouTube and the Weather Globe.
