I’m no stranger to playing under the hood with my machines. Before I switched to Macs in 2005 I was building my own PCs, and even after the switch I built a hackintosh in an effort to have a machine as fast as a Mac Pro at under $1,000 (I succeeded). So when I bought my latest MacBook Pro soon after launch in early 2011 I knew full well I was going to tinker with it so I could suck as much power out of the little beast as I could.
To date, I’ve added 16GB RAM to it, upgraded the HDD to an SSD and removed the optical drive to install a data doubler with another SSD.
When OS X Yosemite was released and I found out that I couldn’t have the handoff feature I was suitably pissed. But I wasn’t the only one. A group of techheads over at MacRumors worked out it was in fact possible to enable handoff in older machines, and in the last few weeks they even released a tool to make the setup simple. Today, I’m going to give give it a crack.
My Existing Machine
I’m performing this surgery on a 13" Early 2011 MacBook Pro. It’s running OS X 10.10.1 Yosemite Beta and from the screenshots below (click for larger images) you can see that bluetooth LE, handoff and instant hotspot are unavailable to me.
An Important Disclaimer
Much like the TRIM Enabler tool in Yosemite, performing the task requires the disabling of the operating system’s kext signing security setting at a global level. Disabling this can leave you open to potential issues and if you do it it’s important that you only install system drivers from sources that you trust. Read here for more information.
The Tools & Stuff I Needed
I refer to these tools throughout this post but for those playing at home, here’s a summary of what I needed for this project:
- A new Airport Extreme Card from eBay (this is for the early 2011 MBP)
- A spudger from eBay
- The Continuity Activation Tool
- The iFixit guide to replacing an Airport Extreme card
The New Bluetooth Card
I needed a BCM94331PCIEBT4CAX Airport Extreme card for my Early 2011 MacBook Pro. I found that out by looking for my system in the table on this page. So please don’t go out buying this model willy nilly - look at the table because you might need a different model for your system.
Step 1 - Opening the Case
I used the iFixit Guide for this and I had it on my iPad in front of my as I worked. You can see from these screenshots my SSD and my data doubler. The Airport Extreme bluetooth card is located at the top left of the laptop.
Step 2 - Getting Access to the Card
Unplugging the battery and all the other connections was a straightforward and painless process. I bought the spudger specifically for this and I recommend you do the same if only for one reason - getting the bluetooth plugs off…they are on good and tight and are quite fragile so fat fingers are out of the question on that one.
Step 3 - Old Card Out, New Card In
Here’s where I found the iFixit Guide making things look a lot more complex than they really were. The guide made it seem like there’s a certain way to bend and slide the card out of position, but in my case it was simply a matter of unscrewing the 5 screws and giving it a little wiggle to remove it. Nothing complex about it at all.
The Piece Itself
So here it is. The bluetooth card is inside this bracket. To get access to the chip, I had to peel back the cover. It’s just some sort of tape so it wasn’t hard to do.
From here I just unscrewed the card and it popped out. I put in the new one and screwed it back up. Not hard at all.
Step 4 - Reversing the Process
Ok. So here’s where I hit a small roadblock. Putting everything back in place was easy overall except for one bit - getting the bluetooth plugs back in. They didn’t want to click in place, so after a bit of trying and a “stuff this” I gave it a bit of a man press they went in and I was back on my way.
I just followed the iFixit guide for this so with the screenshots they provide it wasn’t hard at all to get things back together after the bluetooth card was in again.
Step 5 - Rebooting
I turned on my machine and everything booted up as per normal. Of course, at this point my bluetooth mouse and keyboard weren’t working so I used the laptop keyboard and trackpad to proceed.
On launch I did get a notice saying my system clock was incorrect. Weird. But I just went to system settings and date and time and it fixed itself up without me doing anything else.
Step 6 - Installing the Software
I had already downloaded the Continuity Activation Tool before I began this process so I just right-click-opened it and launched the tool.
Below are some screenshots of the process, but the first time the software is run it does some diagnostic checks and tells you that kext signing is still on and you’ll need to reboot to disable it.
I rebooted and launched the software again and the setup process continued. It only took 5 minutes all up.
Seeing if it Worked
Ok so once the above process was done, I could choose to enable handoff on my mac. It’s an option that appears under System Settings > General. I had to log out and back in to iCloud again and that’s a pain, but that was the only hassle. Handoff was already enabled on my iPhone 5s.
Checking the system specs it looked like everything was working.
Testing with Quip
Here’s some shots showing how it works with Quip.
Summary
That was too easy. It’s all up and running and to be honest the best thing about it isn’t handoff itself it’s:
- Having access to instant hotspot with just one click and no need to touch my phone
- Having bluetooth low energy, which allows me to use cool apps like Knock to Unlock
- Being able to Airdrop between my phone and my Mac
Remember that these benefits come with a warning though. Because it disables kext signing, I’m pretty sure I need to disable handoff (using the Continuity Activation Tool app) before I install any OS X updates in future and then re-enable again.
I’m fine with that. I knew I had to do that to use TRIM Enabler anyway, and I dealt with a hackintosh which required similar things. How often does OS X update anyway? (not nearly often enough!)
In the event I forget to disable there might be some boot problems, but I’ve found a guide to fix up the boot problems so nothing serious.
Onwards and upwards!