If you’re wondering which Bluetooth 4.0 dongle I bought, this link will bring you to the item page on eBay and it cost me US$12.98 for the dongle. So in the end, I decided to pick one that apparently used a photo of the dongle (see below) plugged into a MacBook Pro and hoped that it would work.
You’d be surprised that there isn’t many that officially states OS X support, especially so for a Bluetooth 4.0 dongle.
So I searched for a Bluetooth dongle that has Mac support. It just went dead without any warning after about 1.5 years of me using my MBP. Why I even explored getting a Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongle was due to the untimely demise of the onboard Bluetooth 2.1 chip on my 2010 MacBook Pro. IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth 4.0 Micro Adapter If you find yourself wanting upgrade your Mac’s Bluetooth 2.1 support with a USB dongle that supports Bluetooth 4.0, here’s a tip for you to get it on the cheap with those Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongles you find posted on eBay. From what I’ve read and seen, all you need is to get a compatible Bluetooth 4.0 module like the IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth 4.0 Micro Adapter and then enable it using the Continuity Activation Tool available here. SOME MORE UPDATES: It seems that a lot of visits to this page comes from users who are looking to try and enable Handoff to work on older Macs. However, since my MacBook’s internal Bluetooth device is actually already dead, I cannot verify this at this point of writing. I’ve added some further tips at the bottom on how you can manually select which adapter to use. MORE UPDATE: There’s been reports that while this guide worked in getting the drivers loaded for the external Bluetooth adapter, some was still stuck with the Apple’s built-in adapter. UPDATE: Looks like with OS X Mountain Lion, you don’t have to do the following hack anymore! The Broadcom dongle I describe in this article is supported on OS X Mountain Lion by default! In fact, the new kext includes support specifically for the IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth 4.0 Micro Adapter ! Also, you might want to consider getting the IOGEAR one since the eBay one I got has a bright blue LED that’s always lit and can be pretty annoying at night.
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