M1 MacBook Pro won't take advantage of Eero's 'client steering' feature

So I have a pair of eero Pro 6E devices. One, the gateway is connected to my modem, and the other is setup as a beacon in the master bedroom. My tablets and smartphones all manage to navigate seamlessly to the closest eero device for the strongest WIFI signal. But my MBP will not. It insists on remaining on the initial WiFi signal it started on. I've tried to delete the WiFi from the radio's WiFi history, restarted the machine, and then reconnected (after entering the password), but it still connects to the wrong device on the network.


Searching the internet I discovered the following command:


sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport prefs joinMode=Strongest


Executing this script instructs the MacBook Pro's WiFi radio to connect to the strongest signal, rather than the most recent one.


But Apple deprecated this and most of the airport functionality (if not all of it). So that's a no-go.


What script can I execute so that my WiFi radio will actually find the strongest signal, and not one from its memory?


I understand that moving about the house (or rather, multiple floors) in a mesh network is a no-go for MacBook users (seriously?), but aside from powering off the eero device that the MBP remembers to connect to, I'm at a loss here.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 26.0

Posted on Oct 22, 2025 2:52 PM

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2 replies

Oct 22, 2025 4:58 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I had shut off the WiFi, forgot the WiFi, disabled WiFi on my other devices (to prevent them from handshaking WiFi info to the laptop), and then rebooted. At least five minutes went by one time when I'd done that. It still wound up finding the initial device it had connected to this AM.


What worked was when I shutdown the beacon for a minute so that the MBP then hopped to the next available device (the one that's about 8 feet away).


As for your advice: is this a solution to a known issue? Shut off the WiFi radio until you get where you're relocating to in the house, and then reactivate it? Because the default behavior of the MBP WiFi radio is to reconnect to the last device. Hence the Airport CLI script that altered that behavior to instead detect the strongest signal.


Apparently that feature was removed in the MacOS 14.4 update (Sonoma).



M1 MacBook Pro won't take advantage of Eero's 'client steering' feature

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