Turning Off Completely macOS Mojave Bluetooth
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
— Walt Disney.
Recently, as you may have notice from my post. I’ve tried to build a hackintosh1 but my WiFi and BT (Bluetooth) card are not compatible or does not have compatible Kexts (stands for kernel extensions which is a driver module for macOS).
As the BT card installed in my laptop still consumes power, I did become curious on how to disable it. I have tried many ways that are not destructive which corresponds to software config modification. There are success in destructive way according to some forum but I don’t like those (e.g. like soldering certain part of the half-mini PCI-E or PCI Express board and or removing completely the PCI-E board) . I’ll try to explain what works for me in disabling the BT without touching the internals of the laptop.
First and foremost, you need to disable the power state of the BT driver.
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist ControlPowerState 0
Then we unload it from the system startup, so application that relies from it won’t even load up in user and kernel space.
launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.bluetoothd.plist
That’s all to it. Your BT is now completely disabled and not draining anymore power. Anyways, if you want to re-enable BT again in your startup and load it on your system, just execute the code below.
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.bluetoothd.plist
launchctl start /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.bluetoothd.plist
What this does is put the running daemons back in place on startup execution phase. That’s all and thanks for reading this article.
- A Hackintosh (a portmanteau of “Hack” and “Macintosh”), is a computer that runs macOS on a device not authorized by Apple, or one that no longer receives official software updates. ↩︎