Airdrop has stopped working

[Jawloms]

Morning,

 

We hardly have any Apple stuff here at all. We have an old MacBook Pro running Catalina 10.15.7 (the newest it will run) and an iPad Pro 2nd Gen on iOS 18.3. Teachers will often film something on the iPad which they then bring to us and we AirDrop it to the MacBook and copy it to the network for them. This has been working for years. Yesterday the MacBook has stopped popping up with the "Accept" box in the top right when we try and AirDrop from the iPad. The iPad can see the MacBook when attempting the Airdrop and if you select it, it just says "Waiting" forever. I've rebooted both, put both in Airplane mode for a couple of minutes and then turned Airplane mode back off, and that is about the limit of my knowledge for Apple kit.

 

Anyone got any suggestions please? I'm not aware either of them have done an update recently.

 

Thank you

 

Stuart

[3s-gtech]

If your Macbook Pro has an Ivy Bridge CPU (which would fit the timeline) you can run MacOS Mojave on it with OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It is a great piece of software, and can get some more life out of your perfectly decent old MBP.

 

That's not the root issue here I suspect, but it will give some more reassurance of compatibility.

 

Make a USB with 10.15 installer on it if you want to roll back.

[DavR]

Do you have the Macbook and the iPad on the same WiFi SSID and/or network segment?

 

I don't know exactly how the networking behind AirDrop et al works, but I seem to recall crossing network segments (ie, different VLANs) being a limitation for some functions.

[bknaggs]

Not a solution to this problem but you can connect to a network drive using the Files app on an iPad if getting something onto the network is the ultimate aim.

[Jawloms]

And today it's working. I've changed nothing.......

[3s-gtech]

If your Macbook Pro has an Ivy Bridge CPU (which would fit the timeline) you can run MacOS Mojave on it with OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It is a great piece of software, and can get some more life out of your perfectly decent old MBP.

 

That's not the root issue here I suspect, but it will give some more reassurance of compatibility.

 

Make a USB with 10.15 installer on it if you want to roll back.

Not sure why I wrote Mojave. Must have got too much into the timeline grid.

 

I meant Sequioa. MacOS 15.