Sequoia’s Warning When Turning Off Bluetooth

Of course, we know why they hassle us to leave Bluetooth on: because it's crucial to their location data mining, errrr I mean services. Used to improve location accuracy is the positive phrasing, i.e. ping known ID/location pairs and update the global map of devices.

Jeff’s good points notwithstanding, I don’t think it’s more nefarious than “we have a lot of support volume from people having turned off Bluetooth and complaining their devices no longer work right, because they don’t understand what role Bluetooth plays in that”.

I imagine “accidentally disabled Bluetooth / thought they didn’t need it any more” is way more likely than “disabled Bluetooth for a good reason”, and that this guided their thinking. Arrogant and paternalistic, sure.

I agree with Sören, with the biggest proof Jeff's statement "The prompt does not appear on laptops."

A friend of mine constantly disables Bluetooth to "preserve battery life" and is regularly confused when audio devices don't work. Having said that, there has to be a better way to solve this than what Apple is doing here.

Yes, Apple is clearly being driven by paranoia. Now this paranoia may be somewhat justified… the mini, in particular, being easily portable, the user could easily find herself with only Bluetooth equipment and therefore no access to anything to resolve the catch-22: she needs HID devices to reenable Bluetooth, but she'd need to have Bluetooth enabled first in order to use the HID devices she has access to. There is a reason the mini ships with Bluetooth enabled.

But paranoia is no reason for such a heavy-handed approach; many devices ship with hardware Bluetooth switches, and while this is a particularly un-Apple-y solution, if they can't come up with anything better that is what they ought to be doing; I can't imagine how a software solution could escape the catch-22, in particular.

"There is a reason the mini ships with Bluetooth enabled."

macOS has Bluetooth enabled by default. There's nothing special about the Mac mini in this respect.

Jeff: I did notice the mini as being aggressive about that: I had just unboxed, booted, and connected it to a display, and it was showing a dialog that was practically assuming I had Bluetooth devices but had forgotten to turn them on. "Dude, you couldn't wait a few seconds for me to connect my wired keyboard and mouse before jumping to conclusions?"

But I assume you're right: I only have my mini as a remotely current reference, as my next most recent Mac is from 2016 (oof!).

My Ventura server Mini, which definitely doesn't need Bluetooth to operated from across the network, shows me this prompt. Thanks for reminding me to go in and turn Bluetooth off again after a minor update—must be better about remembering to do that. It's just ridiculous though, Apple needs to make it easier to both keep BT off and not keep prompting. A physical switch may indeed be a good solution to this, but I doubt Apple would entertain that.