IOS – AirPods won’t switch to MacBook

airpodsbluetoothiosiphonemacbook pro

My AirPods (1st gen) won't switch over to my MacBook Air (early 2015 running the latest Mojave) from my iPhone 8. When I click 'connect' the indicator just spins and nothing happens. Restarting resolves this, and my AirPods are then able to connect to my MacBook. Any ideas as to the cause of this? Are my AirPods perhaps faulty?

Best Answer

Apple has always these kind of bugs with their wireless (or even wired) platforms. You just need to force it to connect.

So you can go to sound settings of system preferences and force connect there.

or if you already have the indicator in the status bar , you can option+click on that and force connect from there.

Note that it could either fail because it may be in-use or disconnect from the other source that already connected and using it (Randomly but second option most of the times depends on what device requested new connection and what device is using it right now).

It always helps me and hope it helps you as well.

Related Solutions

MacBook Wifi dies, computer needs to be restarted

Solution that avoids having to restart the computer:

Go to terminal and type

sudo ifconfig en0 down

And enter your password. This will cause the WIFI card to restart and (for me) the connection to be restored.

Macbook Pro (Early 2015) bluetooth issues after waking from sleep

Same model, similar issues - though I wasn't getting kernel crashing, but occasionally get non-responsive bluetooth after wake from sleep. An alternative workaround to restarting is to force quit the blued process. This can be done either through Activity Monitor or on commandline killall blued.