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Mac mini not showing Bluetooth device names

For some reason, my new Mac mini running OSX Lion isn't ever displaying the human-readable names of my Bluetooth devices; it only shows the Bluetooth addresses. Whether it's talking to my Macbook Pro, my Apple Wireless Keyboard, or my Apple Magic Trackpad, it only shows the hexadecimal address, and none of the extended information. As a result, OSX is constantly complaining about my keyboard being low on battery, while simultaneously not being able to display the battery level in the Bluetooth menu. It's pretty frustrating.


I've tried removing all my BT devices, deleting all the Bluetooth-related .plist files I could find, and restarting and repairing everything, but nothing works.


This is getting pretty annoying. Has anyone else run into this issue, and found a fix for it?


It's been doing this out-of-the-box with the mini (which I bought a couple weeks ago), and I've never had this happen on any other Mac, including my MBP 15" which is also running Lion.

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7), 2.7GHz i7, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD

Posted on Aug 12, 2011 8:43 PM

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6 replies

Aug 17, 2011 12:40 AM in response to fluffy

I figured it out. Since I had initially setup my Mac mini with Migration Assistant, some of the Bluetooth preferences from my MacBook got in, which apparently were interfering with the correct operation of the new Bluetooth 4.0 driver. The following command in Terminal fixed it (after an immediate reboot):


find /Library/Preferences /Users/*/Preferences -name 'com.apple.Bluetooth.*' | xargs sudo rm -rf

Mac mini not showing Bluetooth device names

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