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After I moved over to a new user account on my Mac—to try to fix another issue—my Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) and iOS 8 “Personal Hotspot” function quit working.

At first it wouldn’t show my iPad’s availability at all. But after deleting the Mac OS X keychain and resychronizing with iCloud Keychain, I could see my iPad in the Wi-Fi network list as an available “Personal Hotspot” once again but I still couldn’t actually connect to the “Personal Hotspot” on my iPad.

The error that would eventually pop up would be:

Failed to enable Personal Hotspot on [Device]. Check to see if the tethering device is turned on and in range of your computer.

I tried turning on and off Bluetooth, deleting my iPad from Mac OS X's Bluetooth preferences, etc… to no avail.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Tim Klein posted a solution on the Apple Support Community that did the trick:

  1. Sign out of the iCloud account on both devices. (I let iCloud delete everything when asked. It all comes back when sign back in later)
  2. Reset Network Settings on the iPhone (General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings)
  3. If necessary, Rename the phone to what you want it called (General -> About -> Name. Resetting network settings consistently renamed my phone to just “iPhone”)
  4. Power down both devices.
  5. Restart iPhone and log back in to iCloud.
  6. Restart other device and log back into iCloud.

I had my doubts as to whether this would actually fix a personal hotspot issue, but I’m happy to report it did. I hope it helps someone else, too.

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  • While this works for a while, my Personal Hotspot feature always eventually stops working, usually after several days.
    – Nate
    Commented Aug 12, 2015 at 15:15
  • In my case is stops basically next time I want to use it, so in few hours. Do we know what is the root cause?
    – user292605
    Commented Jul 19, 2016 at 6:10
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In my case, just signing out of iCloud on the Mac then connecting to the hotspot prompted for a password, when it hadn't been prompting for password before. I was then able to connect

My iPhone was replaced entirely by Apple Support so a new Hotspot password was generated - I'm guessing iCloud had an old copy of the password and wasn't realizing that that one didn't work and it needed a different pwd.

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  • This worked for me, basically instantly. When I signed out of iCloud on my Mac, my phone moved from the 'Personal Hotpsot' section of the WiFi dropdown menu and into the wifi networks. I could then connect and things started working immediately.
    – cam8001
    Commented Jul 4, 2019 at 1:17

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