Serious Bluetooth Fail on the MacBook Pro

I’m baaaahaaaaack.

So I thought it would be a good idea to start using my Wireless Mighty Mouse and the nice little Wireless Keyboard again with my MacBook Pro while it is sitting on my desk connected to a nice 24″ Dell display.

Unfortunately it seems that Bluetooth is full of fail; so far my MacBook Pro has lost connection with these two devices at least once an hour. The only cure is to use the trackpad and manually turn bluetooth off and on again.

What I see in the system log file is this:

AppleFWOHCI_AsyncTransmit::waitForDMA - context not going inactive.
[closeConnection] Error: L2CAP channel psm:40 wasn't closed properly - forcing it closed.

There is an 8-page thread on the Apple discussion forum. It is full of complaints about exactly this issue.

Some people say Apple is aware of the problem and claim it is related to the periodic Time Machine backups. This could be the case as Time Machine also runs every hour, which would be consistent for my case.

I also read some claims that this issue has been fixed with 10.5.6. but we’re on 10.5.7 now for a while and a lot of folks still complain.

So far there is no fix or no workaround. Except the obvious one: don’t depend on Bluetooth.

I’m so disappointed with this seriously lame case of fail. There used to be a time when Macs worked flawlessly. That great time when we could point at a Windows machine and go ‘haha’. Not anymore; Macs have just as many weird annoyances and bugs as PCs.

Please Apple. Fix this extremely lame bug that somehow slipped through your low quality quality assurance department.