Here’s how to enable one of the most important features of Yosemite, Handoff, which lets you continue the work you do on your Mac carry over to your iPhone or iPad with ease. While Apple claims that the feature is available only on selected (new) Macs, here’s a trick to enable the Handoff feature on your older Mac.
Note: This might need a bit of Hardware tweak, but then, it works without any issue. We tested this on 2011 MacBook Pro, with a replaced Airport Card that has BLE in it.
Before you move ahead with this tutorial, it is important to know if your computer has BLE chip in it. To do that, just go to the Apple icon in the Menu Bar > About this Mac > System Report > Bluetooth
If you are sure that your computer has BLE chip in it, then move ahead:
- Download this KEXT file from here.
- Now, You will have to enable the KEXT developer mode on your Mac. To do that, Open Terminal, and type the following command
sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1"
- Reboot your MacBook Pro
- If you see that the WiFi options are greyed out, don’t panic, this is normal. Now, go to ~/Library. To do that, in Finder click on Go > Computer > System > Library > Extension
- Open Terminal again, and type the following command:
sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext
sudo chmod -R 644 /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext
sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches
- That is it. Now Reboot your Mac again, to refresh your KEXT cache.
- Open System Preferences > General > Enable the Handoff feature
- Open Terminal again, and key in this command:
kextstat | grep AirPort
That is it. You will now have Handoff up and running on your old MacBook Pro. This feature has been tested by many other folks running Yosemite on 2011 MacBook Pro. Let us know in comments if you have ANY query, we will be able to help you out.