| The steel mounting case effectively shields the wi-fi and Bluetooth antenna from effective use, and, in fact, YOU MUST TURN OFF wi-fi in the xMac mini Server TB3 edition or it may intefere with Thunderbolt functionality. You may use an external USB Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Adapter.
For Bluetooth, use the Sonnet USB-BT4 Long-Range USB Bluetooth 4.0 Micro Adapter.
To use the Sonnet external Bluetooth 4.0 adapter on macOS:
1. Open Bluetooth System Preferences
2. Unpair all bluetooth devices from the internal bluetooth.
3. Check "Show Bluetooth in menu bar"
4. Option-click Bluetooth in menu bar, and note the internal Bluetooth address
5. Turn Bluetooth off and wait 5 seconds
6. Plug in the Bluetooth adapter and wait 5 seconds
7. Turn Bluetooth on.
8. Option-click Bluetooth in menu bar to comfirm that the Bluetooth address has changed to the external Bluetooth adapter
9. Pair your Bluetooth devices
10. To make the selection permanent, in Terminal, enter sudo nvram bluetoothHostControllerSwitchBehavior=always
To restore the setting to use internal Bluetooth, enter sudo nvram bluetoothHostControllerSwitchBehavior=never
11. M1 Mac minis hide the USB ports behind the T2 security chip, so you must unplug and plug in the USB Bluetooth adapter after every boot. It is not necessary to do this on Intel Mac minis.
For Wi-Fi, some customers have used the Edimax EW-7822ULC external USB 2.0 wi-fi adapter, or the faster Edimax EW-7822UTC external USB 3.0 wi-fi adapter. |