Apple Bungles Bluetooth in Mac Pro

(When I wrote this article in late October 2006, I assumed that Apple would eventually discover the problem and fix it. After all, there are many posts on Apple’s Support discussion boards about this issue. But, no; I get one or two emails a week from readers who have Mac Pros and have the same problem. I’m astounded that Apple still hasn’t fixed this–in fact, it is clear that the problem is not just in factories, because this morning I received an email from a reader who had the Bluetooth module installed (and wired incorrectly) in an Apple Store.

One more thing. I had the motherboard of my Mac Pro changed last week–there was a problem with USB ports. The technician who came to change it was the same one who walked me through the wiring change for the Bluetooth module over the phone–see below for more on my change. He was very interested to see which wires went where; when he took out the motherboard, it was very clear: the wire that had been originally connected to the Bluetooth module was the one that ran to the AirPort antenna at the back of the computer.)

When I got my new Mac Pro, I was delighted to have such a fast, quiet, powerful new Mac. I was also very happy to be able to use it with my recently-bought Mighty Mouse, which is one of the nicest input devices I’ve used yet. So to do this, I had to order the Bluetooth module, which is a build-to-order option on the Mac Pro. Alas, Apple bungled very badly, connecting the wrong wire to the Bluetooth module. But I’m not the only person who has had this problem; it seems endemic. Read on to find out the whole story…I started wondering what was wrong when my mouse skipped across the screen. Tracking was, at times, normal, but at others it was jerky. I’m right-handed, and the mouse is to the right of my keyboard; the Mac Pro is on the floor, just next to my desk, at a distance of about three feet. It’s in a kind of bookcase, and there’s a desk between it, but the bookcase is open at the front and back, so those two pieces of particle board couldn’t be blocking the Bluetooth transmission, so I thought.

Since I have AppleCare on the Mac Pro, I called the support team. They made me go through the usual motions–run a hardware test, reinstall the Mighty Mouse software, try another user account, and do a clean install. (Note that this was about two hours of my time to get a EUR 39 Bluetooth module and EUR 69 Mighty Mouse to work together…) Nothing resolved the problem, so they determined that there was a problem with the Bluetooth module and/or antenna, and told me a technician would get back to me to set up an appointment. AppleCare here offers on-site repairs for desktop Macs, and that’s one of the reasons why I always buy such contracts: living in rural France, the nearest Apple repair center is a few hundred kilometers away.

The next day, the technician who would come and make the repairs called to make sure he understood the problem, and to say he was ordering the parts. Yesterday (about a week after he ordered the parts) he called to say he would be coming today to make the repair. But in the meantime, I had looked around and seen, on Apple’s discussion boards, that other users were having the same problem. Not only was the problem the same, but a solution was offered.

Here’s where we get to the bungling on Apple’s part… The Bluetooth module is a small chip placed on the motherboard, and it has to be connected to a tiny wire that runs to the Bluetooth antenna. This wire is one of four, three of which are labeled: one has a “BT” label (this is a sticker that wraps around the wire), one is labeled “2″, and another “3″. For some reason, there is a fourth wire which is unlabeled.

The 2 and 3 wires are shorter than the BT and unlabeled wires: they are just long enough to reach the location where and AirPort card would be added. (I don’t have AirPort, so they’re not connected.) The other two wires (BT and unlabeled) are the same length; both can reach the Bluetooth module. So the solution proposed was to switch the BT wire for the unlabeled wire; as the posters in the thread linked to above have all said, this resolves the problem.

So here’s the rub: what happened is that two wires got mislabeled. This didn’t happen when the Bluetooth module was added to the computer, but during the actual assembly of the Mac Pro. This means that either all of Apple’s process sheets have an error, or only some Mac Pros are affected. It’s hard to know which: not every Mac Pro purchaser will get the Bluetooth module, so they won’t have a problem unless they add one later. Also, since the Mighty Mouse works at a distance of about two feet, many users may not realize that there is a problem: it seems that the module itself, and whatever that wire is connected to, emits enough power to work at short distances. (Whereas Bluetooth is speced to work at up to 10 meters or 30 feet.) These users may, however, have occasional problems, and write them off as battery issues or interference.

This has already cost Apple a bit of money, in support calls, and in exchanging Mac Pros, which they seem to have done in some cases, as well as keyboards and mice. The technician who was to come and change my Bluetooth module was especially glad that I could fix the problem (I did it while he walked me through it on the phone), because he had a total of five hours’ drive to my house and back.

Apple’s quality control has failed here. It’s pretty simple to mislabel one of two similar wires (though I haven’t yet found what the purpose of the other wire is), but to allow a machine to go into production without that being discovered is surprising. Again, this may only be the case on a limited number of Mac Pros, or it could affect all of them.

Apple, if you’re reading this, you’d better resolve the problem in your factories, and you had better then contact everyone who has bought a Mac Pro with a Bluetooth module. Save your time, and save ours–two hours the first time, then another hour yesterday to make the fix (going slowly, with the technician on the phone, to make sure I didn’t screw anything up) is far more time than I need to spend on a mistake that is the result of ineptitude. I grant that mistakes happen, but I’m tired of spending so much time to resolve them, simply because you haven’t found them yet.

July 2010: I still get emails about this, and comments are posted to this article, so apparently there are still issues with Bluetooth on Mac Pros. I sold mine more than a year ago – not because of the Bluetooth issue, but because I wanted to downsize (I got a Mac mini) – so I can’t help those who post asking for more help.

Here’s a link to a site that shows some pictures, which, if I recall correctly, match what I saw in my Mac Pro.

More info, Sept. 2010: A reader has pointed me to the following information that he posted on his web site. He solved the problem using a third-party Bluetooth dongle.

Mac Pro Take 4: Bluetooth Mighty Mouse is a No-Go – Now it Works!

A bit more than a month ago, I wrote a positive review of Apple’s wireless Mighty Mouse. At the time, I was using it with an iMac G5. Since then, having replaced my iMac by a new Mac Pro, I’ve had nothing but trouble with the Mighty Mouse. It stutters and skips, with the mouse about 3 feet away from the Mac Pro. (The Mac Pro is on the floor to the left of my desk; I’m right handed, so the mouse is on the right side of my keyboard, on my desk.) I have no other Bluetooth devices, so there is nothing that interferes with the transmission. It’s clearly a Mac Pro problem, not a mouse problem, since the erratic behavior occurs even when the mouse is in line-of-sight with the Mac Pro at more than 3 or 4 feet.
AppleCare is sending a technician next week to change the Bluetooth module and antenna. But threads such as this one on Apple’s discussion boards, and in other forums, suggest that this problem is not merely anecdotal. Apparently, aluminum is a very efficient shield, and the Bluetooth antenna, it seems, is at the bottom of the Mac Pro. To be honest, seeing the results of these repairs on other problematic Mac Pros, I have little hope that mine will work any better.

So this raises the question: didn’t Apple test this? Bluetooth is supposed to work at a distance of about 10 meters or 30 feet; if a wireless mouse can’t function with the Mac Pro at 3-4 feet, there’s a serious design problem. While I originally used the wireless Mighty Mouse with an iMac, which was on my desk, it works fine at a distance from the iMac, so it’s not the Bluetooth technology that is ineffective. It’s truly a design problem with the Mac Pro, or with the placement of the antenna.

I’ll wait and see what happens when the technician “fixes” the Mac Pro, but I’m pretty much resolved that this simply won’t work. Are any of you using a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse with the Mac Pro successfully? If so, how far is it from your Mac Pro?

Follow up on September 25. I followed the advice given in this Apple discussion thread, while having the technician walk me through it over the phone (telling me where the cables are, etc.). It works fine.

To sum up, somehow Apple’s assemblers have inverted the labelling of two of the cables, the BT one and the one that is unlabeled. This is a serious problem, not so much because of usability, but because of what this foolish mistake is costing them. Some people have said that Apple exchanged their Mac Pros, others that they changed the BT module and/or antenna. The fix is simply one of correcting human error.

See previous installments:

Mac Pro: Take 1 – The Quietest Desktop Mac Ever

Mac Pro: Take 2 – The Power of Spotlight

Mac Pro: Take 3 – The Weird USB Extension Cord

Mac Pro: Take 3 – The Weird USB Extension Cord

The Mac Pro doesn’t come with many extras: a keyboard and mouse, of course, a DVI-VGA adapter, so you can connect an older monitor, and installation DVDs, a small user’s guide, and some other papers. And two white Apple stickers.

But it also comes with a weird USB extension cord (see the above photo). This cord is weird because it is designed to work only with Apple keyboards. As you can see in the photo, the female end of the cord has a nib in it, which corresponds to a groove on the male end of the keyboard’s USB plug. Why does Apple include a USB extension cord that you cannot use for anything but the Apple keyboard? Seriously, this is stupid. It means that, if have a different keyboard, you can’t use the extension cord. Or if you simply want to use it for something else–such as your mouse–you can’t!

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a proprietary USB extension cord, and I certainly hope it’s the last. Since I’m not using the Apple keyboard (I prefer Microsoft’s ergonomic keyboards) I won’t be using it. What a waste.

I’d love to know which nitwit at Apple came up with this idea. (Steve, tell me it wasn’t you…)

Check out the Mac Pro. It’s a great, quiet, fast machine. And, if you buy from Amazon.com, you can take advantage of a $150 rebate. What a machine…

Coming installments of this series will discuss the computer’s speed, its innards, and much more.

See previous installments:

Mac Pro: Take 1 – The Quietest Desktop Mac Ever

Mac Pro: Take 2 – The Power of Spotlight

Mac Pro: Take 2 – The Power of Spotlight

When Apple introduced Spotlight, the powerful search technology which is part of Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger, this was the first real-world application of instant searches of files, their content and their metadata. It was also the first consumer application of real-time searches of this data; except that, on most Macs, it wasn’t quite real-time. Many users lamented the time it took to run Spotlight searches, and it’s true that on slower Macs, the time necessary is excessive. On my previous Mac, an iMac G5, some searches would take several seconds, and searches that resulted in thousands of hits (kind:music, for example) could take a couple dozen seconds.

Some of my colleagues have railed against not only Spotlight but the lack of simple Finder searches, such as were available in previous versions of Mac OS X. You can no longer simply “find files” from the Finder; you have to use the Finder search bar, which is simply a different interface for Spotlight. The complaints are the same: this can be very, very slow.Not with the new Mac Pro, however. In fact, it seems that Spotlight was developed with computers of this speed in mind. If I search for “and” in the Spotlight menu, it takes just a couple of seconds to return 18,000 hits. Searching for “the” in the Finder takes two seconds to return 20,000 hits. And to find my 36,000 music files, searching for “kind:music” in the Spotlight menu, takes only three seconds.

This means that not only are “simple” Spotlight searches faster and more practical (ie, searches from the Spotlight menu), but also that more complex condition-based searches from Finder windows are finally useful. (However, there are still some quirks; searching for Kind > Music, and Created > This Week in the Finder did not find music files from a half-dozen CDs I ripped yesterday…)

What does all this mean? First, Apple needs to follow one of the golden rules of software design: always test your software on the slowest machine that users will have, rather than the latest, greatest model. Second, don’t design tomorrow’s software today. Many users have sworn off of Spotlight because it was too slow; with today’s Mac Pros, they can use this technology fully. But only with today’s Macs (I’m sure the speed gains are similar across the Intel Mac line, at least with the other core-duo models). Spotlight works very well–and I’ve been a fan since the beginning, using it to discover hidden files containing content that I need to find–but now it works as it really should.

Check out the Mac Pro. It’s a great, quiet, fast machine. And, if you buy from Amazon.com, you can take advantage of a $150 rebate. What a machine…

Coming installments of this series will discuss the computer’s speed, its innards, and much more.

See previous installments:

Mac Pro: Take 1 – The Quietest Desktop Mac Ever

Mac Pro: Take 1 – The Quietest Desktop Mac Ever

Today I received my new Mac Pro. I ordered it about a week ago, and opted for the 2 x 2.66 GHz model, with 2 GB RAM and Bluetooth. I didn’t need any additional hard drives (anyway, they’re cheaper from third-party vendors) or optical drives (I have an old IDE DVD drive that I might add). I’m not the kind who usually goes for either top-of-the-line Macs, or for desktop Macs, preferring, in recent years, the iMacs and iBooks. But this time, I wanted to get something fast, and something that might last more than the usual 18 months (I’ve changed Macs about every year-and-a-half for a while). I wanted an Intel Mac, for a variety of reasons (both speed and the need to update one or more of my books for Leopard, which will entail talking about running Windows on the Mac).

So this is the first of a series of articles I’ll be posting about the Mac Pro. Each one will be short, and focus one one specific aspect of the computer and its performance. Today’s installment: the Mac Pro’s noise level.First, I’m someone who has always searched for quiet Macs. Even since I suffered the noise of a Performa 6400 (I actually built a cork-lined enclosure to try and cut down the decibels on that one) I’ve opted for the quietest possible Macs. The early iMacs, with no fans, were perfect for me. So were iBooks: I had a G3 and still have a G4 iBook, which, other than when their fans go on (which is rare) make no noise at all. My last Mac, an iMac G5, was more noisy, but I accepted it for the quality of its screen and the overall performance of the computer.

So when friends and colleagues were at the WWDC, the first thing I asked was, “How noisy is it?” Given that they were only able to check out the machines in rooms with people milling about, their “Very quiet” answers were to be taken with a grain of salt. But reading some users’ comments, saying that it is “whisper quiet” or that they “only hear the hard disk”, I was convinced that it was time to take a chance. (I live in the country, so can’t go to any store and try out a Mac.)

Well, I’m certainly stunned by the lack of noise that comes from the Mac Pro. It is whisper quiet; and you can only hear the hard disk (a noise that, oddly enough, doesn’t bother me). It is, without doubt, the quietest computer I have ever used (aside from those laptops, when their fans aren’t running). I have it right next to my desk, and can barely hear it; with music on, it is as though the computer is not even there.

So, if you want a quiet Mac, the new Mac Pro is for you. And, if you buy from Amazon.com, you can take advantage of a $150 rebate. What a machine…

Coming installments of this series will discuss the computer’s speed, its innards, and much more.