FU iMac Bluetooth troubleshooting advice

[Chew Toy McCoy]

The other day my AirPods weren’t connecting to my iMac. It saw them in the options but just kept showing the spinning circle trying to connect. No issues connecting them to my iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV at the time. Just my iMac. I tried several troubleshooting methods that didn’t work. Then I saw a suggestion that I turn Bluetooth off and then back on. This is where things got ugly.

You know what else connects to my iMac over Bluetooth? My keyboard and mouse. Can’t turn Bluetooth back on without a mouse. Then I read a suggestion saying to hard reboot the iMac and it would turn Bluetooth back on automatically. It didn’t. And I tried multiple times. Before you suggest I need to reboot while holding down a key combo I need to remind you that I couldn’t use the keyboard because Bluetooth was shut off. More on that later.

After that there was a suggestion to plug the mouse into the computer with a cable. Great, except the genius engineers at Apple put the cable port in the bottom of the Magic Mouse which disables using it as a mouse. To fuck with you further if the mouse is plugged in it does see if you turn the mouse switch on or off and lets you know that on the screen. WTF is the point of that?

So I asked my roommates if they had a wired mouse. Of course they didn’t. Almost nobody does. So off to Target I went to get the cheapest wired mouse I could find.

Plugged in the mouse and it worked! Sweet! Clicked on the login and got the password prompt. Which I can’t enter without a keyboard. FUCK! Back to Target to get the cheapest wired keyboard I could find.

So about 2 hours and $30 in hardware + gas money later I recovered from the “just turn Bluetooth off and back on” advice. At so many points it didn’t “just work”.

 

[DT]

I was going to say you could take those back, but it's handy to have at least a wired KB (use you can always use shortcuts vs. the mouse), but both can be much easier when dealing with BT issues.

FWIW, there's a handy little command line util called blueutil, you can enable/disable, so you just run a shell command that disables, sleeps for x seconds, run enable to do a "touchless" BT toggle off>>on

 

[mr_roboto]

Plugged in the mouse and it worked! Sweet! Clicked on the login and got the password prompt. Which I can’t enter without a keyboard. FUCK! Back to Target to get the cheapest wired keyboard I could find.

So uh... maybe you were discouraged from trying by your experience with the mouse, but the Magic Keyboards work fine as USB wired keyboards if you plug them in with a USB-Lightning cable. Unless this was the older style of Apple wireless keyboard which takes AA batteries and has no Lightning port?

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

So uh... maybe you were discouraged from trying by your experience with the mouse, but the Magic Keyboards work fine as USB wired keyboards if you plug them in with a USB-Lightning cable. Unless this was the older style of Apple wireless keyboard which takes AA batteries and has no Lightning port?

You’re right! I’m actually using a wireless Logitech keyboard but I could have plugged it in. My blind rage over the whole experience lead me to get a wired keyboard, but like @DT said they are good to have on hand now if I have a future issue like a dead charge.

 

[Macky-Mac]

You’re right! I’m actually using a wireless Logitech keyboard but I could have plugged it in. My blind rage over the whole experience lead me to get a wired keyboard, but like @DT said they are good to have on hand now if I have a future issue like a dead charge.

I have this problem occasionally.....like today.

Usually just clicking on the wireless mouse a few times brings bluetooth back to life, but not always. I've still got a wired mouse from previous iMacs and now I leave it plugged. When bluetooth goes out and a few clicks on the wireless mouse don't resolve the problem, I'll give the wired mouse a click or two and that seems to reactivate everything.

I've read that often this problem is a result of too many wireless devices competing for bandwidth......but I dunno......it's definitely annoying