Airdrop Hack For Older Macs

I accidentally stumbled upon this tip, the other day, while searching for something completely different. I upgraded to Mountain Lion directly from Snow Leopard, thus ignoring the AirDrop functionality introduced in Lion. However, I soon realized that on my old MacBook Pro 2007 model (MacBookPro3,1) this feature did not exist at all.

In the sidebar ‘Favorites’ section there should be and entry for AirDrop. If you do not see AirDrop in Finder’s sidebar, open Finder’s preferences (Finder menu Preferences item), Sidebar tab, and under “Show these items in the sideba.

Apparently, for AirDrop to work natively (with Lion and Mountain Lion, only) Apple requires the existence of “hardware necessary to support a certain type of point-to-point Wi-Fi connection” that is probably not present on older models.

  • With the exception of the terminal hack, because, I believe that is for unsupported Mac's. My problem is connectivity, Airdrop on my iMac does not see either MBA and vice versa. I have had all three computers with their respective Airdrop windows open simultaneously, as I stated previously, the two Airs see each other instantly.
  • The other Macs (mid 2010 MacBook Pro, iMac 24') show up in the Mac mini's AirDrop window, just not vice versa. I even used a Terminal command hack but that did nothing. I even tried the old trick of sending a file to MBP first to have mini show up, but it disappears on the MBP as soon as the transfer is complete.nothing can be sent back to.

Thankfully, it appears that it is possible to allow “unsupported” Macs to enable this functionality, too, via a simple Terminal.app command, as with all good things on OS X:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1

Whether it works well or not, that is another story!

After successfully entering the command above, it is advised to either relaunch Finder or simply reboot the computer. This system setting appears to be permanent, after each reboot.

Airdrop Hack For Older Macs Free

Macs

People reported that even for newer models, I need to activate this feature on every Mac in my local network in order to use it properly, including ethernet-only connected Macs.

Airdrop Hack For Older Macs &

To disable this feature, I only need to set the last digit back to zero, of course:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 0

Airdrop Hack For Older Macs 2019

I am quite happy this “hack” still works under Mountain Lion 10.8.0 and 10.8.1, so if you have an older Mac computer that can still run Lion or Mountain Lion natively, no need to go jealous on the AirDrop functionality of newer computers!

My thanks to OSXDaily.com for posting the original tip of the anonymous user over MacOSXHints.com.

Airdrop Hack For Older Macs Mac

Update: Looks like it works fine with my MacBook Pro (2007) via Wi-Fi and my Hackintosh via Ethernet! (both running Mountain Lion 10.8.2)