[SOLVED] MacOS Wifi No Hardware Found Can't Get USB Wifi to Work Either

Getting external wifi dongle to work with MacOS requires third-party software...

I have a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro (i7 quad-core 2.3 GHz, Nvidia 650M 512 MB / Intel HD 4000 1536 MB (I upgraded the 512 MB regular hard drive to a 2 TB SSD, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM some time ago)).

In late 2019 the built-in wifi started switching off by itself after the last OS update/upgrade (now on macOS Catalina 10.15.4).

This only became worse and worse, until now my internal wifi no longer works. I disassembled the system to check all the connections on the wifi hardware and reassembled, and it came back up briefly, but yet again the OS switched it off after a while, and after a few weeks eventually stopped coming up at all.

I then tried using various external usb dongles I had handy that are Linux and OpenBSD (and Mac) compatible, but they weren't showing up at all even with /usr/sbin/network... -detectnewhardware command.

Fortunately there is a free third-party app that helped address the external USB Wifi dongle issue though my builtin appears to be completely dead.

This is the main Github page:

https://github.com/chris1111/Wireless-USB-Adapter

Here is the download I used. https://github.com/chris1111/Wireless-USB-Adapter/releases/tag/V12

Unzipped, and ran package installer.

Mandatory reboot.

Then the USB dongles worked great!

Relevant Reference Information:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/eli7sl/looking_for_macos_compatible_usb_wifi_adapters/

https://community.netgear.com/t5/WiFi-Adapters/compatibility-macos-catalina/td-p/1805601

https://bartechtv.com/wifi-cards-compatible-with-macos-mojave-on-hackintosh/

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255