Mac – Brand new Apple Mac-Mini cannot connect to ANY WiFi Network — “Connection Timeout”

mac-miniNetworkwifi

I'm at my wits end here with a new Mac Mini. I bought a brand new mac mini, took it home, and did nothing but create a user account. When I try to connect to my network (Comcast Xfinity), I continuously get a "connection timeout" error before it even authenticates my password. The same thing always pops up when I try to connect to ANY network around me, even using my phone as a wireless hotspot. However, another MacBook Pro, iPhone 6, Lumia 920 (Windows Phone), and Surface Pro 3 in this apartment are able to connect without ANY issues whatsoever, so it is definitely isolated to my mac mini.

I took it into the apple store today, and they decided that it would be easiest to just give me a new mac mini. I tested it out at the store, and it was able to connect to both an open and a WPA2 encrypted network. Brought it home, and NOTHING. Connection timeout!

Here are some things I have tried:

  1. Creating a new location inside network preferences with other options removed.
  2. Removing password on network and making it open.
  3. Restarting Mac Mini and router.
  4. Changing channels on my router with random ones from 1 to 11.
  5. Changing ipV6 to Link-only (someone recommended this).

I cannot find any more suggestions on google, and apple's phone support is fairly unreliable. I am so frustrated with this…I am normally a windows person, and was really expecting a magical out of the box experience, not this. ANY help would be greatly appreciated. I will post whatever logs I can to help out!

Here are my machine specs:

OS: OS X Yosemite Version 10.0.1

Hardware: Mac mini (Late 2014)
-2.6GHz Intel Core i5
-8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
-Intel Iris 1536 MB graphics

Thank you so much guys!

Best Answer

It's a combination of the Mac mini and the xfinity router. I've had this problem with multiple Apple devices over the years, but only when using the xfinity router. Do yourself a favor, buy a really good router and just use a cable modem. I guarantee this will fix the problem.