Bluetooth LE Adapters Don't Enable Handoff In Yosemite On Older Macs
by Joe White
June 19, 2014
Owners of Apple's older Macs aren't going to be able to take advantage of Yosemite's "Handoff" feature even if they connect a Bluetooth low energy (LE) adapter to their machine, a recent report warns.
The news, which reached us from MacRumors, comes following previous claims that Apple's push for "Continuity" between its desktop and mobile products relies on the Bluetooth LE protocol -- a standard that several older Macs, as well as the iPad 2, unfortunately don't support.
While we suggested earlier this week that Handoff would be available for Bluetooth LE-compatible devices only, some had hoped that through connecting a Bluetooth LE adapter to a legacy machine, owners of Cupertino's older computers would be able to "hand off" messages, email, and more to a companion iOS device.
It now seems this isn't the case.
MacRumors shares information posted in its forums by registered developers running OS X Yosemite beta 1.0 and iOS 8 beta 2, the next-generation iterations of Apple's desktop and mobile operating systems (which are available in prerelease versions for members of Cupertino's developer community).
While adding IOGEAR's Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter to a 2010 MacBook Air indeed enabled Bluetooth LE support, it still didn't activate Continuity or AirDrop on OS X Yosemite:
As such, our list of Mac computers expected to be compatible with Handoff holds true. Our previous article explained:
the Macs presumably compatible with Handoff would include the mid-2011 MacBook Air and above, the mid-2012 MacBook Pro and above (including all iterations of the MacBook Pro with Retina display), the late-2012 iMac and above, the mid-2011 Mac mini and above, and the late-2013 Mac Pro.Both OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 are expected to launch in either September or October. Yosemite will be a free download on the Mac App Store.
