MacBook Pro Stopped Connecting to iPhone Personal Hotspot

MacBook: Intel Core i7, Sonoma 14.5 iPhone: 11, iOS 17.5.1, Verizon

Couple days ago I tried out my personal hotspot on my iPhone for the first time ever to verify I’ll be able to use it for network access from my macbook while on a trip

As soon as I turned on Allow Others To Join, the iPhone device name popped up on the macbook’s list of available networks, I joined, entered the password and everything worked fine. I used it for a few minutes, then disconnected and rejoined the home wifi network on the macbook.

The next day I changed the personal hotspot password to something custom (it has > 12 characters including upper/lower case letters, numbers, and legal special characters), started up the hotspot again, but now the device name does not show up on the macbook’s list of available networks.

Here’s what now happens every time I try to connect to the personal hotspot:

  1. On the iPhone, I open the Settings -> Personal Hotspot view. If I don’t do this on the iPhone before the next steps, the macbook won’t find the hotspot at all

  2. On the macbook’s System Setting Wi-Fi window, I open the “other…” networks dialog and enter the iPhone device name as the Network name, leave Security set to wpa2/wpa3 personal, enter the hotspot password, and click OK

  3. The networks dialog pops down, and the device network name briefly pops in at the top like it’s connected, and then immediately disappears

  4. The macbook displays a password dialog that says “The Wi-Fi network “<device-name>” requires a WPA2 Personal password”

  5. I enter the password, verify it matches the hotspot pwd character by character, and click OK

  6. Infinite loop over 2-4 above

I have tried restarting both the macbook and the iphone, toggling the hotspot on/off, toggling all network services on the iPhone, toggling wifi on the macbook, bluetooth device pairing, deleted local and system keychain entries matching the device name, none of which has made any difference

I am able to successfully join the hotspot from a separate windows PC in the house, so it looks like a macbook issue, probably not an issue with the hotspot on the iphone

Anybody else run into this problem and get past it? Google searches and apple support forums haven’t produced any other useful suggestions