TL;DR

My iPad Mini 5 wouldn’t connect to access points running WPA2-PSK/WPA3-SAE Mixed Mode so I’ve had to reconfigure them to just WPA2-PSK in order to get connected.

Background

I mentioned in my Flint 2 review that my motivation for getting a new router was better stability for my iPad and various devices. It’s certainly been a great improvement for the devices, but not so much for the iPad.

New Access Point

I decided to replace the Draytek AP960C with an OpenWrt based access point, and picked the ZyXEL NWA50AX Pro. Once I got it set up everything was working fine, except for the iPad Mini 5, which refused to connect to any of the SSIDs. I’d made things worse :(

My best guess at what was going on is that the AP960 was working fine with the iPad, but the Flint 2 (and the 2866ax before it) weren’t; and that the iPad was (frequently) trying to roam from access point to router, failing, and not always falling back very gracefully.

No mixed mode

After a bit of poking around online I saw some comments that suggested a possible problem with WPA3[1]. I set up an SSID with just WPA2 and that worked fine, so rather than having extra SSIDs for no good reason I made the call to regress from WPA2-PSK/WPA3-SAE Mixed Mode to just WPA2-PSK.

WTF Apple?

It’s absolutely baffling that the iPad Mini 5 suffered an inability to connect whilst other iPads, iPhones (and indeed everything else) worked just fine.

Note

[1] Some others suggested issues with AX (WiFi 6) spec routers, and suggested dropping back to AC. I’d note that the Mini 5 is a WiFi 5 spec device.