I'm trying to get the Siri Remote gen3 working with my old-assed iMac (recently upgraded to Catalina, highest it will go). Will this remote be compatible? I've got another couple weeks to return it for a refund if it isn't.
Someone on apple.stackexchange.com suggested that I might need an older version of BTT, but I'm not sure what version I'd need, let alone where to find those.
the Mac needs to support at least Bluetooth 4, then it should work. The iMac might be too old, unfortunately I don’t have much experience here.
So I’d recommend trying to pair the remote and see whether it’ll be recognized by the Mac.
https://support.apple.com/kb/SP688?locale=en_US
The specs page says BT 4.0 (have to scroll down a bit, but it's there). Despite that, the remote only shows up as a generic device (keyboard icon) in the Bluetooth device list.
ah, it looks like the gen3 requires macOS ventura due to missing drivers on older versions ;-(
the older versions don’t seem to have this limitation
Are drivers for these baked into the kernel, or is it something I could grab from another machine and manually kludge in?
unfortunately you wouldn’t find drivers that work on older macOS versions because Apple doesn’t release then. You can’t copy the ventura version to a catalina macOS unfortunately
iospirit (Remote Buddy) provides some more info here Control your Mac with your Siri Remote | Remotes | Remote Buddy | Apps
This is frustrating. I can see the packets received when I sniff it with Bluetooth Explorer on this mac. I can read the battery level, see the audio when I hold the microphone button. So close, yet so far.
possibly some of the functionality could be achieved with BTT‘s „generic device support“ if it is recognized there.
However it would probably be easier to get the gen2 model ;-(
http://docs.folivora.ai/docs/1500_generic_devices.html
Ahhhh no, I think generic device support is also not available on Catalina ;-(
Maybe try upgrading to Ventura? According to Supported Models | OpenCore Legacy Patcher, the iMac 2013 is fully supported (and the opencore patcher is awesome!)
Oh wow... not sure how brave I am to do an unsupported upgrade. Will think about it.
I know it's not your software and you can make no promises, but have you ever used it yourself? Was it relatively trouble-free?
yes, it was completely trouble free. You can even install standard macOS updates afterwards. I have had it running on multiple older Macbooks for quite a while.
Only limitation is, SIP can not fully be enabled on patched systems as far as I remember ( but it will probably still be way more secure than running macOS 10.15)
//edit: I think on the 2013 iMac even SIP is supported, in that case there really isn’t any noticeable difference to an officially supported version
Thank you. Ventura's installed, it seems to be working fine. Worth the upgrade even by itself. I have some success getting the remote to work now, though I suppose it'll take awhile to configure it the way I'd like.
Nice! That's definitely worth the upgrade by itself.
10.15 has some pretty bad security issues by now, which Apple doesn't seem to fix anymore.