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I bought a refurbish iMac with no bluetooth card. I want to add one.
I’m not sure if the antenna or data cable are even present in your system. For reference here’s the guide for the standard model iMac Intel 21.5" EMC 2428 Bluetooth Board Replacement and here’s the needed parts: Bluetooth Board - 922-9902Bluetooth Antenna - 922-9904Bluetooth/Camera/Sensor Cable - 922-9802
I have a late 2011 iMac EDU model without bluetooth and I tried every possible solution including replacing AirPort Card with an Airport/bluetooth combo card, didn’t work, I added a full Bluetooth, iSight, Bluetooth antenna kit from Powerbook Medic with everything properly grounded, Bluetooth card installed on the top left above the lcd power board and connected to iSight and plugged in the middle if the logic-board, all went absolutely smoothly and still does not work so I don’t know what Apple did to this model but I does not support internal Bluetooth unless someone can tell me different? I even checked the hardware profile using terminal and installed working kexts and a known good profile pane and it’s just not there, seems to me it’s some kind of Bluetooth power issue and you somehow need a separate power source to activate the Bluetooth Adapter, if anyone has had success please advise Update (06/16/2020) there is a board adapter you can buy on Aliexpress that has the 2012 and up iMac AirPort card that includes Bluetooth which includes the adapter but it doesn’t work.. also I installed a complete kit including Bluetooth Card, Bluetooth/iSight USB cable and Bluetooth antenna into this imac and still no Bluetooth so apple didn’t include either programming in the firmware to detect the Bluetooth or power to the Bluetooth because I have been repairing all Macintosh computers since the first PowerBook and I can’t make it work and I did everything including forcing kext files for the hardware, resetting SMC, PRAM and force checking the devices in terminal, it can’t be done period, save your time and money and buy a Mac comparable USB Bluetooth dongle
I had the same problem and I was able to solve it with a Baseus USB Bluetooth Adapter. Not as elegant as the internal card, but works just fine.
use a Bluetooth dongle Update (03/16/2021) replaced everything with no luck. I even replaced the main wiring harness.
