Dear Aunt TUAW: How do I enable AirDrop on my older Mac?

Thanks a million working on iMac 24inch early 2008

Thank you very much! This worked for my mid 2007 intel iMac right away.

Great fix!

I can confirm this worked on my Early 2008 iMac!

Regarding the usefulness of Airdrop, it is still extremely useful even when both Macs are on the same network, as if you are trying to send a file to someone else's Mac, they may not have Dropbox or file sharing setup, and even if they do there are several more steps required such getting the other user's dropbox e-mail address, sharing a folder, accepting a folder etc, Airdrop is much more convenient when you just wish to quickly send someone a one off file.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a heavy user of both Dropbox and File Sharing, but they both have their particular uses, and quickly sending a file someone elses Lion Mac is Airdrops.

So I got my early 2008 MacBook to now work with AirDrop, I can even see my Late 2009 iMac which had AirDrop by default... my problem seems to be that the iMac can not find the newly enabled MacBook unless I use the Macbook to send a file first. This way the MacBook shows up on the iMac, but not long enough to find a file on the iMac and send it the other direction... when any communication terminates between the two devices, the Macbook simply falls of the iMac's radar, while the Macbook can still locate the iMac.... help?

I've found something similar to this, but it enables AirDrop on ALL computers running Lion (Yes, my hackintosh) and works through any network connection, meaning ethernet too.

.... or you can dump air drop entirely and get the free mac app called "DropCopy".

Not only does it work on the earlier hardware, but it also works under Snow Leopard!

I got Airdrop to work on my late 2006 MacBook with this. Thanks guys!

Works great on my old Mackbook Pro3.1 2007 model.

According to Apple Documentation available here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html

AirDrop supports the following Mac models:
 
MacBook Pro (Late 2008 or newer)
MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer)
MacBook (Late 2008 or newer)
iMac (Early 2009 or newer)
Mac mini (Mid 2010 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2009 with AirPort Extreme card, or Mid 2010)

It's a hardware limitation because AirDrop uses peer-to-peer Wi-Fi between participating Mac computers it doesn’t use a wireless network infrastructure or base station.

Info available here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#airdrop

Hey, so, this doesn't work on my 2008 Mac Pro. I ran everything as listed above - though it wouldn't run with the 1 - and the menu option doesn't appear in preferences or automatically in the side bar. Is this just not going to work with this machine? I'm running it at work on a wired network at work but transfer stuff from my MBP pretty often so it'd be nice not to need to use an USB hard drive. Any clues?