Friday 5 April 2019

Mysteries of Apple Bluetooth accesories

17:45 Posted by G No comments
I've now moved fully onto Office 365, so have converted purely to Mac world, and just occasionally dip into Citrix for a few enterprise apps.

So I'm not starting to see some idiosyncrasies between 365 on Mac and PC, most of which are well documented, but it is quite annoying to come across these messages from the 365 Mac dev team


Anyway the point of this post was I've been having trouble with a wireless mighty mouse and apple wireless keyboard working together with my 2018 MacBook Pro.  I was having what I thought was interference between the bluetooth accessories. But having done some searching I found out two things I didn't know. This manifested in the mouse moving in a very jerky fashion and the keyboard being unresponsive and then typing some keys multiple times.

Firstly like WiFi you can see advanced Bluetooth details by holding Shift and Option while clicking the bluetooth icon in the menu bar.  This will show advanced options show more details as well as the debug options. (for WiFi it's just option and click WiFi)

Secondly which I think is the root of the problem I was having is this tip :

" With some time and experimentation, I have learned the problem is triggered when I wake the computer from sleep mode using the keyboard.  It appears the keyboard wakes up repeating the keypress.  The only way to stop this is to power off the keyboard and power it on again.

The work around is to wake up the computer using either the trackpad or mouse.  Don't touch the keyboard!"

thanks to WheelMcCoy on the Apple forums for the tip - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7555728

Finally this was happening on OSX 10.13 (High Sierra) but I've just upgraded to 10.14 (Mojave) and haven't seen the problem so far.