16-inch MacBook Pro Bluetooth issue
I bought the new 16-inch MacBook Pro when it first came out and was happily using it until a week later my bluetooth stopped discovering devices, in particular my Magic Mouse and iPhone. I tried everything from resetting nvram, smc, resetting the bluetooth module, removing bluetooth.plist, downloaded bluetooth explorer and reset a bunch of settings etc and even went to the extent of completely formatting the computer and installing osx from scratch to no avail. Hardware diagnostics showed no hardware issues as well. The bluetooth device was showing up fine in System Report but it just wasn't discovering anything. I have a work laptop (2017 MacBook Pro) which I use side by side and it was working fine.
Long story short, I was able to replace the device at the Apple store I bought it at since it was within the 14 day return policy window. So I put it down to just being unlucky.
It's been a few weeks since then and I now have the same issue with the replacement laptop. This time though I think I know what triggered it.
I have a CalDigit dock that I use for my work laptop and occasionally have a usb bluetooth device attached to it for some work I do in virtual machines. The issue occurred when I connected my new MacBook to the dock along with the bluetooth dongle. The usb bluetooth dongle worked fine however when I disconnected the thunderbolt dock from the MacBook I noticed the bluetooth icon in the top right hand corner changed to an icon with a zigzag across it, obviously due to bluetooth device being disconnected.
Since disconnecting the external bluetooth device I'm having the same issue as I had previously, my MacBook Bluetooth device won't find any devices and is not recognized by other bluetooth devices like my iPhone/other MacBooks. I've gone through the whole process as before, and have resorted to a clean install of osx to no avail. I've even compared bluetoothd console logs between the working MacBook I have and the now broken one, the only difference is the working MacBook is able to detect devices when they are advertised, whereas the MacBook Pro 16-inch does not.
Digging into this, it seems as though OSX by default switches to any attached USB bluetooth device when it's plugged in and then when disconnected, it reverts back to the onboard device. This works fine on my old MacBook as I've been using the USB dongle for a while now without any issues. I initially thought that there may be a software issue with the internal bluetooth device not switching back properly but I would have thought a clean install would have fixed it so there must be some sort of hardware issue specifically with the new MacBook Pro 16-inch.
I'm pretty frustrated now as I've now gone through two 16-inch MacBook Pro's with bricked bluetooth devices that I'm fairly certain was caused by connecting an external bluetooth dongle via thunderbolt. I'm pretty sure onboard devices shouldn't die just because a third party device was connected/disconnected.
Has anyone come across this yet with the new MacBook Pro 16-inch? I'm going to visit the Apple store tomorrow to see what they can do but I'd prefer if I didn't have to send my laptop away and just find a fix myself if there is one. If not, I thought it'd be good to post my experience here in case anyone else comes across this.
MacBook Pro 16", macOS 10.15
