MacOS – Any way to adjust Bluetooth radio sensitivity

bluetoothmacos

I've got a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse connected to a MacBook at my desk in my home office. When I'm laptopping outside the office (which is honestly most of the time), away from the keyboard/mouse, they stay connected, thereby chewing through batteries and popping up warnings.

I was hoping there was a way to adjust the radio sensitivity or cutoff or something. For example, I'm outside the office right now and they're about -75 dB RSSi, and I'd like to tell the system "don't connect to devices with signal below -60 dB".

Best Answer

I ended up solving it myself. In short:

  1. get signal strength from system_profiler; if bad, turn off bluetooth
  2. check AC power with pmset; turn on Bluetooth if connected

Needs blueutil to toggle Bluetooth.

I couldn't find a way to tell a device to shut off remotely.