Solution: A1016 Apple Wireless Keyboard - pairing with bluetooth (macOS Sequoia)

I've bought a beautiful A1016 Keyboard yesterday and struggled a bit, even with the content posted here using `blueutil`. In fact, as it's Bluetooth 2.1 (from 20 years ago), we've to tell the system to use it.

So I ended up tuning with the system a bit.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist EnableLegacyPairing 1
sudo defaults write/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist EnableClassicDiscovery 1

Then we have to restart the bluetooth deamon.

sudo pkill bluetoothd 
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.*

After that, we can use `blueutil` to get the keyboard MAC address.

To do so, we can scan the BLE band with this:

# Continuous scanning for a minute or so 
for i in {1..6}; do blueutil --inquiry --format json; sleep 10; done

Be sure to have the keyboard looking for a connection, so blinking green light at the back of the case.

Eventually, you'll get a log that looks like this

[{"address":"00-0a-95-3b-95-65","recentAccessDate":"2024-11-13T20:08:24+01:00","favourite":false,"name":"Wireless Keyboard","connected":false,"paired":false}]2024-11-13 20:08:24.255 

So grab "address":"00-0a-95-3b-95-65"

And now I you can log precisely:

log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.bluetooth" AND eventMessage CONTAINS "00:0A:95:3B:95:65"' --level debug

Now

# First make sure Bluetooth is on 
blueutil -p 1 

# Force classic pairing mode 
sudo defaults write/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist ClassicPairingEnabled 1 

# Try pairing with PIN code 0000 (common for BT 2.1 devices) 
blueutil --pair 00-0a-95-3b-95-65 0000

After that, you can enjoy your "new" keyboard experience.

Cheers ⌨️