Mac Pro owners having problems with Magic Mouse Bluetooth connectivity
11:15 am, December 1st, 2009, John Brownlee
Even if Leander can’t quite figure out how to use it, the multi-touch capable Magic Mouse is quite a stride forward for Mac owners… especially given Apple’s execrable history of making decent mice. Still, no new piece of gear is without its technological problems. No surprise, then, that the Apple support forums have become the petri dish in which isolated Magic Mouse troubleshooting complaints have been allowed to multiply into a wider culture sample of product failure.
The issue seems to be widespread amongst Mac Pro owners, who simply can’t get the Magic Mouse to play nice with their machines. Pair a Magic Mouse with a Mac Pro and your experience will be rife with stuttering cursors and suddenly lost connections… a situation made even more frustrating because the device works without a problem when connected to other computers.
Unfortunately, the problem seems to be endemic to the design of the Mac Pro itself. It appears that the Mac Pro’s Bluetooth antenna is hidden on the underbelly of the machine, under a plastic cover. According to Mac site HardMac, this causes the Mac Pro to have much spottier Bluetooth reception than other computers with better placed Bluetooth antennas, and the Magic Mouse is particularly fussy about it.
The only fix? Pick up an aftermarket Bluetooth module and plug it into a USB port. That’s hardly the “It just works” solution you’d hope for in an Apple product… let alone one with the word ‘magic’ right in the name.
[via HardMac]
(Creative Commons Image via jaudrius on Flickr)
Posted by John Brownlee in Apple, Mac Pro | Comment on this article
Hi John! Good to see you suddenly pop up here and there on the internet, always on my feed reader anyhow!
Camillo, on December 1st, 2009 at 11:29 am
I have a mac pro, I bought the magic mouse, I love it, but I am facing this issue. The mouse is really near the tower so it never loses connection but the tracking sometimes become slow. One thing I do is to use the other mouse (cabled) to turn off/on bluetooth, then it gets better. By this observation I’d dare saying the problem is software related and could be solved with a fix by Apple. Look forward to it, magic mouse is a piece of art!
Marcio Cyrillo, on December 1st, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I have a Mac Pro as well and have the same stuttering issue. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it does do it. I find it depends on where I have the mouse on my desktop. So I am guessing it is a signal problem, maybe they can fix it with a fireware update, but I’m think a USB dongle might be a good option as it is really annoying. I love the magic mouse, but this problem needs to be fixed. I don’t want to have to go back to my Microsoft mouse
Jared, on December 2nd, 2009 at 12:41 am
Sure enough, same problem. Thanks for posting this. You spared me the headache of fussing with this thing.
The mouse almost kinda works if I put it Right Up To the tower. Otherwise it’s lag city. Totally unusable. I wonder if it’s worth another antenna. I like the feel and button layout of my Logitech G5 anyway.
n2dcwitme, on December 9th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Issues rendering an otherwise great Xmas gift idea *almost* worthless. Not bad enough to return, not good enough to say “it just works.” Pity. I won’t want to use my MS Mouse anymore, either. Don’t want to buy a dongle. WTF?
Michael, on December 29th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I was having this problem with my Mac Pro and Magic Mouse. It appears that many mac Pros have the bluetooth antenna labelled and therefore connected incorrectly on the internal BT module. This results in degraded BT performance.
If you swap the antenna wires over the problems disappear. Worked for me !
See:
http://www.thelocale.org/files/howtos/mac-pro-bluetooth-howto.pdf
(guide)
http://guides.macrumors.com/Adding_Bluetooth_and_Wireless_to_a_Mac_Pro
(step 5 gives instructions and a picture.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10622130
Guy, on January 2nd, 2010 at 12:45 am
After 3 weeks of messing about with drivers and wires on my G5 and getting no where I got a cheap Belkin Mini Bluetooth Adapter Network adapter for £6
Everything is now perfect.
Desmond Lee, on January 6th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
The swapping of the wires worked for me too!! Nice work!
Brian, on January 8th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Hello. I got the magic mouse for christmas, and it has been working fine until today.
Last night before I went to bed, I shut off my magic mouse to save the battery.
In the morning, I turned it on, and set it up to connect using the bluetooth setup assistant.
First, It said an error had occurred, so I tried again, and then it said there were no mice at all. It said “Make sure you device is discoverable.”
I need some help with this.
Matt, on January 9th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Got a new Mac Pro and bought a Magic Mouse. I had the same problems as Matt. My daughter removed the back cover on the mouse and it’s running great!
I’m not sure why this works, but this is a quick and simple fix which doesn’t require changing anything inside your box.
BTW I’m not having any issues with the keyboard battery drain (89%) or mouse battery (81%) and I leave them on all the time. Keyboard wakes the computer every time, just push the space bar. Also, I’ve turned off discovery in System Preferences as I’m no longer loosing BT comm.
Good luck!
Frank, on January 13th, 2010 at 1:10 am
Ok… I got the magic mouse, and the macbook pro yesterday at the same time. I got home and my magic mouse will NOT work. It clicks, but it won’t do ANY of the multifinger gestures. I can’t scroll, swipe, or do anything like that. If you have any ideas, please help… My brother also got it yesterday, and his did the same thing, but after a while, it just started working and he didn’t do anything.
Parker Page, on January 24th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Make sure you have the Magic Mouse software update installed via Software Update under the Apple menu. That could be why his just “starting working” one day, potentially after updating the software.
If you go into to System Preferences and don’t have any of the fancy videos or options under the “Mouse” preference pane, you probably don’t have the software installed to take advantage of the features of the Magic Mouse.
Muschology, on January 27th, 2010 at 5:52 pm