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Sometimes it can happen that after turning on your Mac or MacBook, you will not be able to control the Bluetooth mouse or the Bluetooth keyboard. In the case of the MacBook, there is one more aspect that you may not be happy about - the non-functional Trackpad. If you got into a similar mess and are unable to activate Bluetooth on your Mac to connect wireless peripherals, then only a classic USB keyboard can help you. You don't need a mouse to activate Bluetooth in macOS, you can do everything quite easily and simply using a USB keyboard. How to do it?

How to activate Bluetooth in macOS using only the keyboard

First of all, you need to find a working USB keyboard somewhere. If you find a keyboard, connect it to the USB port of your Mac. If you own newer MacBooks that only have Thunderbolt 3 ports, you will of course have to use a reducer. After connecting the keyboard, you need to activate Spotlight. You activate Spotlight on the keyboard using Command + Space, but if you have a keyboard intended for the Windows operating system, then it is logical that you will not find Command on it. Therefore, first try pressing the key closest to the space bar on the left. If you do not succeed, try the same procedure with other function keys.

bluetooth_spotlight_mac

After you manage to activate Spotlight, type “Bluetooth file transfer" and confirm the choice with the button Enter. As soon as you start the Bluetooth file transfer utility, the Bluetooth module on your macOS device is automatically activated. This will reconnect your Bluetooth peripherals, i.e. keyboard or mouse.

This trick can come in handy if you wake up one day and neither your mouse nor your keyboard is working. It's practically just that you can use a plain old USB keyboard to activate Bluetooth and there's no need to wrestle with Bluetooth in any other way. So if it happens that your Mac wakes up without a functional Bluetooth, then you can definitely use this trick.

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