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>due to Apple's choice to block old iMacs

this wasn't a choice of blocking older Macs. The fact is that continuity requires Bluetooth LE (or you would be complaining about greatly reduced phone battery life) and your old iMac doesn't have BT-LE capable hardware (BT-LE and BT only share the name - aside of that they are quite disimilar)

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It's a little less clear than that, unfortunately. Apple chose to not support third-party Bluetooth LE dongles, which might be a reasonable engineering limitation. However, if you upgrade your Mac with a BT-LE capable board used by other Continuity-capable Macs, you still can't use Continuity by default; you need to patch some kexts and disable kernel kext signing[1].

It really does feel like Apple blacklisted older machines from using Continuity; only third-party kext hacking can get things started again.

[1] https://github.com/dokterdok/Continuity-Activation-Tool/

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