I’ve started noticing a interesting trend: the built-in WiFi in laptops seems to break quite often.

Whats worse, is the failure seems to be either intermittant, or causes hardware timeouts (otherwise seen as a “very slow laptop”).

Its difficult to diagnose a failure, when the WiFi might run OK for hours / days, and then stop working for hours/days… or if the laptop slows to a crawl for about 1 minute every hour.

I often end up going around in circles, until I decide to plug in a USB WiFi adapter… and then everything runs perfectly.

I once wondered why most laptop makers continue to build laptops with a removable WiFi cards (rather than integrate them into the motherboard). I thought it might be so they could offer a WiFi-less laptop for a lower price.

Now I’m starting to think it might be so that these unreliable components can be easily and cheaply replaced when a warranty claim is made.