I’ve got a cool new bug a few days ago, completely spontaneously and without updating any software or changing any configuration. After waking my MacBook from sleep, I couldn’t move the mouse pointer with my wireless mouse. The bluetooth connection was there, but the pointer just wouldn’t move. Turning the mouse physically off and on would result in successful reconnection, but even then the pointer would not move. I had to go into Bluetooth settings, remove the device entirely and then pair it again. After this happened for the first time, it was reproducible and happened every single time after waking from sleep. As a result, I quickly learned how to do the entire Bluetooth-Remove-And-Pair dance completely via keyboard shortcuts/controls. It was annoying, but not annoying enough for me to try and see if a reboot would fix it.

Then Apple released a shiny new update. I woke my MacBook from sleep, saw the notification about the update, wanted to click it, cursed because my mouse pointer wouldn’t move again. So I figured this was a good time to reboot and see if the mouse issue would be solved by that. I also figured that I would just save the time to fix the mouse pointer problem – now being a master of keyboard controls, I foolishly thought I could just trigger the update that way. Turns out, the button to actually start the update can not be reached that way. The screen recording above shows me tabbing through all available controls in the Software Update preference pane.

Silver lining: the reboot did fix the mouse pointer problem.