Broke the volume and screen on my trusty iPad 2 last week, so the family bought me the “new” iPad. Was very excited to check out the new screen. Had heard about the heat concerns, but wasn’t too worried about it.
Well, when I opened it and started playing around, I found a problem connecting to the internet. I was able to get connected to my home wifi network, but would find that sites would time out intermittently. They just stopped loading.
Thinking this might just be a glitch with one device, I took it back to the Apple store. There, they connected to their wifi and showed the device to work just fine. Thinking maybe I hadn’t tested it enough, I took it back home to try again. That night, I had the same thing happen again. This got me thinking maybe our internet connection, or perhaps our Netgear wireless router was causing trouble. However, I pulled out the busted, but trusted, old iPad 2 and found that I could make the new iPad hang while watching the exact same site load immediately on the old iPad2. I then checked the wifi specs for both iPads on Apple’s website, thinking perhaps they had changed something and my router might be out of date. Nope – identical specs. Hmmm.
So, yesterday morning, I took the “new” iPad back to the Apple store, explained the situation to the folks at the genius bar and, though they couldn’t find anything wrong with the device, happily gave me a brand new replacement iPad. Got home, barely unwrapped it, and found the exact same issue. To make sure there was really something wrong, I took a video of the brand new iPad sitting right next to the old iPad2, connected to the same wireless network, with completely different results. See below:
I then search Google to see if there had been any reported issues about wifi with the new iPad and, lo and behold, on Apple’s own support site, 46 pages of comments this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/
So, much like a Vista user several years back, I decided it would be better to downgrade to the more reliable “XP-like” device, the iPad2. The folks at the store were great about it, refunding the difference in price. I’m happy with the iPad 2 (though am disappointed that they only sell the 16GB version) and remain a fan of Apple products, but thought it worth sharing for any others who may find curious wifi behavior in their new iPads. I should also note that the store employees said thay had not heard this issue from other users, and even 50 pages of comments is a small fraction of the 3MM devices Apple sold in short order, so my guess is that there is something different in their wifi hardware/software that doesn’t work as well with older modems/routers. Would be nice if someone more technical than I (or Apple themselves, though I doubt it) could get to the bottom of this.