“Last week a prominent Apple developer issued a stinging rebuke of Apple’s software quality, saying that it had ‘fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future,'” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Judging by the influx of complaints about the latest Mac OS X release on Apple’s support forum, there does appear to be a problem, but it may not be software. Instead, the problem may be with a key WiFi component supplied by Broadcom.”
“I decided to poke around the Apple support forums to get a feel for what users were complaining about. At any given time, there are always complaints, but what I found was a firestorm regarding WiFi problems under Yosemite. The forum thread started shortly after Yosemite was released in October and continues to the present. The thread goes on for over 135 pages with over 2000 separate posts. This is very atypical,” Hibben writes. “The complaint scenario was always the same: WiFi had worked just fine under the previous version of Mac OS X (Mavericks), but failed intermittently under Yosemite.”
“It also became clear that many other complaints about Apple software were actually WiFi driven. Complaints about Safari (Apple’s included web browser) mysteriously locking up, inability to access email or use messaging, anything iCloud related, all seemed to be misidentified WiFi problems,” Hibben writes. “Many of the forum posts indicated some relationship between Bluetooth operation and WiFi. Often, users were able to restore some level of WiFi capability by simply turning Bluetooth off. This peaked [sic] my curiosity since many Apple Macs rely on a small card, called an Airport card by Apple, that combines Wifi and Bluetooth functions. These cards are all made by Broadcom.”
“Mavericks went through similar though not as severe problems with WiFi when it was first rolled out, indicating that Apple has had a longstanding problem getting Broadcom’s hardware successfully integrated,” Hibben writes. “The real question is why has Apple allowed itself to become so dependent on Broadcom?”
Read more in the full article here.