Magic-x Wireless Bluetooth Usb Adapter

[Anjali Reyome]

Im using a Magic Mouse with my MacBook Pro and Mountain Lion. The cursor sometimes start to lag. I figured, the reason for this could be the distance between my Mac and the mouse (about 1.5 meters / 5 foot).

I bought an external USB Bluetooth dongle I want to plug into my monitor on my desk, so the mouse is closer to the controller. However, I can't figure out how to make OS X use the external dongle instead of the built in controller.

When I go into System Prefs > Bluetooth and hold the Option key to display the reception, I see that it is the strongest when it's next to my Mac and not when it's next to the dongle. So what can I do to change that? Thanks!

Edit: This no longer appears to work as of at least macOS 14 and Apple Silicon. I believe Bluetooth Explorer worked (if you already had it) for at least some functionality on macOS 13 on Intel. On my current M2 system, not a single bit of Bluetooth Explorer works correctly, so if you have it you can probably trash it.

The easiest way to use the USB adapter is to reboot. If you hold down the Option key while clicking on the Bluetooth menu icon, the MAC address of the adapter should be different. You can also verify in System Profiler. You'll know it's working if any existing pairings break.

The on / off button in System Preferences is a little buggy. Turning off the adapter works fine, but clicking "on" turned the internal adapter back on. I had to unplug the adapter, plug it back in, and then turn Bluetooth back on.

If you want to work around this without rebooting, you can use Bluetooth Explorer from the OS X developer tools. You'll need a (free) developer account. There's a ton of useful tools to debug interference, pairing issues, and so on.

Looked in here: /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. There i found a bluetooth plist file. I trashed it, rebooted, and then my USB dongle was finally recognized. I did not need to reset any SMC, NVRAM.

You shouldn't have that much of a reception issue from 1.5 meters. Even with some interference between the mini and your mouse, BT should be fine so I might be suspect of something else causing the issue rather than the Mac Mini BT card. But yeah, go into System Preferences > Bluetooth and turn it off.

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