Selecting a PIN-protected companion on a Mac reported an error, and selecting it
a second time connected -- the first attempt having quietly done the bonding.
CoreBluetooth has no pairing API: a peripheral pairs implicitly when something
touches a characteristic requiring encryption. The companion firmware puts its
UART characteristic at ENC+MITM precisely so that happens, so the unbonded
subscribe is answered with Insufficient Authentication *and* that answer is what
makes macOS raise its Passkey dialog. The GATT operation is dead by then; the
bond it began arrives seconds later, once a person has read six digits off a
device and typed them. Treating the refusal as a verdict therefore reported
failure for a pairing that was succeeding.
So on macOS the connect now waits for the dialog to be answered instead of
giving up on it, bounded so a dismissed dialog still fails in the end. Elsewhere
a rejection keeps meaning what it always did -- Windows and Linux can pair
explicitly, and do, before the link is opened.
The message that survives a dismissal no longer recommends --ble-pin there
either: macOS collects the code itself, so the flag cannot help, and naming it
sends the reader somewhere with nothing to offer. It names the dialog, and the
Bluetooth permission the terminal needs for one to appear at all.
The tests that cover a rejection now state which platform they mean, rather than
inheriting whichever runner they landed on -- the macOS leg of the matrix would
have failed on the old wording, and on a PIN it no longer forwards.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
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