Cannot pair MacBook Pro with A1016 wireless keyboard

One thing I'd suggest trying is to reset the Bluetooth module on your Mac. To do this, hold down Shift + Option and click the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar. Choose "Debug" and then "Reset the Bluetooth module". After doing this, restart your Mac, and then try to pair the keyboard again.

If the reset doesn't work, you might want to try deleting any existing Bluetooth preferences files. You can do this by going to Finder, then press Cmd+Shift+G and input the following path: ~/Library/Preferences/. From there, look for any files that start with “com.apple.Bluetooth” and delete them. Again, restart your Mac after doing this and try to pair the keyboard.

As a last resort, if you've been using Homebrew to manage your bluetooth connections, you might try uninstalling it entirely to see if that resolves the conflict. It's not ideal, but sometimes these tools can interfere with native system functions.

Remember, before you do any major system changes, it's always wise to have a recent backup of your data, just in case.

**References:**

1. Reset the Bluetooth hardware

2. Troubleshoot Bluetooth devices

3. Delete preference files

I had a similar problem with only ever getting "No Connection" or "Unspecified Error" on macOS Sonoma / MBP M1. This seems to be because I had the Bluetooth settings window open.

Closing the Bluetooth settings window allowed me to successfully pair an A1016 keyboard with:

blueutil --pair 00-0a-95-xx-xx-xx 0000 

I also had a a lot of errors.

The trick that worked for me was to have the bluetooth windows open until it found the keyboard and then tried the blueutil code in terminal.

me too. this sucks

Manually installing Blueutil works as well (instead of installing via homebrew). It took me over 60 attempts to get the A1016 working on my M2 Mac mini Pro. It's a bunch of trickery that shouldn't be necessary.

In my case, I kept getting connection errors, but READ the notes and comments. Issue 71 has some good info on it. I happened to press in 0000 <enter> at the right time...eventually. I'm typing this comment on the A1016.

Funny enough...my fingers are more used to typing on the current keyboard now. 😂 HOWEVER, I almost trashed this keyboard thinking it would just never work again! I'm very happy to have it to switch to every now and then with my new Mac hardware!

The A1016 worked fine with blueutil under Monterey but after upgrading to Sonoma I couldn't get it to work. Constantly getting

Failed to pair "xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx" with error 0x02 (No Connection)

OR

Failed to pair "xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx" with error 0x1f (Unspecified Error)

What finally worked was adding and enabling Terminal in Settings => Privacy and Security => App Management. I already had Terminal enabled in Bluetooth but didn't know to enable it in App Management until I was setting up something else and Sonoma took me there.

This worked for me too after many weeks and even visiting the genius bar.

...

only for me to find that not all they keys work.

Numbers 1-5, t, back space, ', space

all fail to work when connected to my mac. Still don't know if this is hardware or software...

Which might explain why pairing codes don't work if there's a five in them (I used 0000 when I eventually got it to work)