Finally Safe To Upgrade To Yosemite’?

The reason I’ve held back from upgrading my MacBook Air from OS X 10.9 Mavericks to 10.10 Yosemite for nearly a year isn’t just procrastination. Among other bugs reported, there have been persistent complaints about maddening Wi-Fi connection issues with Yosemite, that in some cases have defied remediation through three 10.10 version updates.

I’m not a particular fan of Mavericks, but it’s stable and it works without drama or hassle on my MBA, including reliable WiFi performance which is an absolute must for me. So while many users have gotten along successfully with Yosemite, more than a few haven’t, and I have not been willing to roll the dice on an upgrade until the WiFi bug was squashed, which it appears that it has been finally with the release of OS X 10.10.4 yesterday.

Several weeks ago, Houston Chronicle tech blogger Dwight Silverman explained that the WiFi bug was caused by Apple’s having replaced an OS subroutine called mDNSResponder that had been used in previous OS X versions since OS X 10.2 to help manage the network stack, with a module called “discoveryd” in Yosemite, which evidently proved a lot less stable and reliable.

However, ZNet’s Kevin Tofel reports that mDNSResponder is back in OS X 10.10.4 the latest Yosemite update — the change detected in the latest beta version of from which discoveryd has been banished.

So finally, it looks like it’s safe for users like me for whom reliable WiFI support is mission-critical. I left the MacBook Air to its own devices downloading and installing a raft of software updates I’d been blowing off (took nearly five hours), and hope to get Yosemite installed and sorted-out over the July 4 weekend.

The operative question is why did it take Apple four updates and the passage of nearly a year to correct this glitch, but hopefully we will now have a real (and seemingly absurdly simple) solution that will clear the way for El Capitan to be free of WiFi bugs. If it ain’t broke, don’t “fix” it.

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