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My father's MacBook Air (Early 2015) has some strange Wi-Fi issues that he says he's been experiencing ever since he got it.

I finally took the time to look at it and there is indeed something strange going on. The Wi-Fi seems to work pretty well, except that it intermittently seems to become slow for a few seconds. This makes streaming video and general browsing really annoying.

I've run a ping google.com for a few minutes and plotted the ping time on an excel graph. And we can definitely see that it hikes 10-fold every few seconds.

I can confirm it's not coming from our router. This doesn't happen on all the other devices that are connected to it.

Things I have tried:

  • Everything in this thread
  • Resetting our router
  • Disabling everything (Bluetooth, Airdrop, etc)

There is one thing I noticed, is that it seems that the laptop's battery has swollen a bit. I'm not 100% sure about this as I don't have another MacBook Air 2015 to compare with.

It feels like a hardware issue, as it's been like this since the beginning (according to my dad). I guess part of my question is "How do I get Apple to take us seriously and do something?" ... I can already imagine Apple telling us that we have to contact our ISP, or that we need to try restarting the computer. Thing is, I have already tried all of that stuff.

Or maybe somebody has an idea what the problem could be?

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It is most likely your battery pushing on other components in the computer. This can loosen connections or cause the wifi transceiver to be partially blocked or even bent. The first step you should take is getting the battery replaced (because swollen batteries can be unstable sometimes anyways) and see if that fixes the problem. If it doesn't there may be permeant hardware damage.

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