Mac Pro owners having problems with Magic Mouse Bluetooth connectivity

By

magicmousejaudrius

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)

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