Bluetooth not available on Mac

Jan 6, 2018 11:40 AM Re: bluetooth not available - High Sierrain response to DJCHR

The following workaround is working for me:

System Preference -> General -> Deselect "Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud services".

Then restart compute.

This worked for me! Thank you for your response!

Possible cause: USB 3.0/2.0 devices causes strong interference with the wireless built-in devices. That was my case. My particular solution: a powered usb 3.0 hub wit shielded cable far away the Mac (a tp-link UH700 or similar).

Info about the interference:

Logitech

WIRELESS PRODUCT NOT WORKING PROPERLY WHEN ALSO USING A USB 3.0 DEVICE

Apple Support:

Bluetooth: Unreliable wireless performance may occur when USB 3.0 external devices are close

Why do I have difficulty with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices when USB 3 devices are attached to my computer?

Are you using VMWare per chance? I traced this down to when I brought up one of my VM's this would cause the Mac host to lost bluetooth. In general settings, uncheck the share bluetooth with host. That fixed it for me. Thus far anyway.

Tried SMC and PRAM reset. No good. Unplugged USB 3 external hard drive. No change. Unplugged Apple Cinema Display Thunderbolt. Worked. Bluetooth returned. Rebooted with display connected. No Bluetooth. Rebooted with display disconnected. Bluetooth returned. Plugged display in while booted. Bluetooth remains. I'm sure this will be temporary, but I will let you know.

James

I have had this problem with varying degrees of frequency for over six months now. A support session with Apple in March was fruitless as they failed to acknowledge that it was a known problem and would only troubleshoot if I uninstalled essential apps and upgrade to High Sierra, neither that I wanted to do.

The problem almost always occurs on wake from sleep, but does not occur every time I wake from sleep.

Restarting the computer [iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)] is not an acceptable option.

The following command line solution seems to work for me. I know that not everyone is comfortable using the command line and it still requires that you can start a terminal window and type into that window, but here it is.

What we are doing is killing the bluetooth daemon which is then automatically restarted by the system.

To get bluetooth running again:

sudo pgrep blued

gives the process number of the bluetooth daemon (this step is not required but confirms that blued is running)

sudo pkill blued

kills the bluetooth daemon

after killing the daemon go to bluetooth setup and all should be good.

Note: this works for Sierra, but for High Sierra the daemon is renamed to bluetoothd

Updated today to MacOS High Sierra 10.13.3 and everything works fine now. Looks like this update included a patch for the issue. Hope this works for others as well. 🙂

On my laptop MacBook Pro 15 "Retina mid-2015 the problem manifests like this:

When I turn on my laptop when the two monitors are connected, the bluetooth does not work.

I solve the problem this way: I disconnect the monitors from the laptop, then turn on the laptop - the bluetooth is working. I connect two monitors and work.

The only way that worked for me was to install http://http://www.frederikseiffert.de/blueutil/ and then run

blueutil off

blueutil on

blueutil on

It only worked at the second "blueutil on" but at least, no restart was needed

There is a command line solution, works fine my OS X HIgh Sierra 10.13.3 found here

Here's a Terminal recipe to make blueutil work for you:

cd ~/tmp/

git clone https://github.com/toy/blueutil.git

cd blueutil

make

make test

cp blueutil ~/bin/

Now run:

blueutil off && sleep 1 && blueutil on

Hi all,

I did say the problem still persists in Mojave. However, in my case, for about a month now, turning off the 'Handoff' feature can get rid of may be 90% of the problem in Mojave. Out of ten there may be once the bluetooth is disabled completely that I need to restart the machine. But so far it's pretty good workaround I can find now.

System Preferences > General > [ ] Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices

I had the same problem and it was quickly resolved by hiding and re-enabling the Bluetooth menu icon in the settings. No need for reboots or deleting files.

This worked for me: http://ntfs-formac.com/how-to-fix-bluetooth-not-available-problem-under-macos-si erra/

From Finder window, press Command+Shift+G to call “Go To Folder” function, then enter the following line:

/Library/Preferences/

2. Find and remove the both “com.apple.Bluetooth.plist” and “com.apple.Bluetooth.plist.lockfile” if available.

3. Shut down the Mac, then boot the Mac again after some a couple of minutes waiting.

“Bluetooth Not available” must be gone away and the bluetooth must work correctly now, and “Bluetooth Not available” must be gone away.

There may be something to this. One thing I noticed is that, when I plugged something into my USB hub (attached to the iMac panel), my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard would just freeze. All of the other suggestions here didn't work. But I simply removed my USB hub completely...no longer using one at all...and my Bluetooth behavior seems fine now (so far).

This is embarrassing. It makes it pointless to use the apple bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. So I'd better throw them in the bing right now with this issue unless Apple does something to it.

It should be as simple as fixing a feature present everywhere... like bluetooth is. And the others work... why the latest OSX doesn't? and why doesn't Apple say a word about it?!

So far what I do is go to the Activity Monitor, look for the bluetoothd process, select it and click Force Quit. That works 80% of the time. The other 20% requires a full restart, which is embarrassing.

J.

Just want to share with you guys that I think I'm almost reaching a solution for MacBook Pro early-2015 users as well. The thing is, I had decided to clean format my hard drive, and reinstalled macOS Mojave. Only with the second wake-up from the sleep, without ANY THIRD PARTY SOFTWARES installed yet at the time, the Bluetooth module just crashed as usual.

So, I reformatted the drive again but this time, I didn't sign-in my iCloud account and immediately disable the 'Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices'. Guess what, my bluetooh module has worked flawlessly for about a week now!!! I've managed to install all the third-party applications I needed and so far everything is FINE!

I'll keep using my Mac without signing-in my iCloud account for a few more days to make sure the bluetooth bug is gone. And I'll update you guys if the problem comes back after I enable the iCloud feature in the System Preference.