[reaperducer]

I think you may be projecting. Wifi cards go bad. It happens. Sometimes they can be replaced. Sometimes not. I've had it happen to lots of my machines over the last two decades.

But I don't think it's fair to characterize what could very well be a hardware fault as the work of some bean counter in Cupertino sitting behind his desk rubbing his hands with glee.

[FireBeyond]

I can't find reference here, but I remember a discussion with an Apple engineer who said that AirDrop had been blocked in a certain model, "due to incompatible wifi", but that the wifi card mentioned was not one they'd ever heard of being put in a production Mac, i.e. "ass-covering BS".