Enabling OS X’s Bluetooth On/Off Switch

One of the vast options available to you when you purchased your Inspiron 1525 was the addition of an integrated Broadcom Bluetooth chip. Dell was offering it for an extra $25, so I jumped on the opportunity of having one extra means of connectivity. Three years and many experiences later, I’ve probably used the Bluetooth module twice. I’ve even gone as far as disabling Bluetooth in the BIOS to save a little battery life. My only problem with that is if a situation suddenly arises where I need my Bluetooth, I have to restart to enable it. It’s a rather unnecessary inconvenience that I would like to avoid. After some quick googling intense researching, I was able to find a solution to my problem.

If you purchased your Inspiron 1525 with Bluetooth, you have a Broadcom BCM2045 chip/card. Luckily enough, Apple supports a wide variety of Broadcom wireless chips, so we have native Bluetooth support. Apple doesn’t, however, directly support our exact card, so we’re missing the ability to power the card on/off from inside OS X. This feature can be added though with a quick change to IOBluetoothFamily.kext. Simply add your Device ID and Vendor ID to the correct info.plist file and, after a quick reboot, you will have the ability to turn the card on and off directly from within OS X. Remember, this physically turns the card off, thus saving you battery power. And since you can just as easily turn the card back on, I don’t see why everyone wouldn’t turn the card off.

To enable this feature, simply kext helper the proper kext included below (either the version for 10.6.4 or 10.5.7) and restart. Note that the 10.6.5 kext will only work on 10.6.5, the 10.6.4 kext will only work on 10.6.4, and the 10.5.7 kext will only work on 10.5.7. These are the versions of these OSs that I’ve been able to test, so I was able to make these myself. If you aren’t running either of these versions, you can follow this superb guide by prasys to edit any version of the kext. Alternatively, you can follow my quick breakdown of the guide below. It’s super simple to do and will result in some extra battery life to dedicate to other tasks.

IOBluetoothFamily.kext for 10.5.7

IOBluetoothFamily.kext for 10.6.4

IOBluetoothFamily.kext for 10.6.5

Quick breakdown:

1. Navigate to /System/Library/Extensions/ and copy IOBluetoothFamily.kext to your desktop

2. Using the copy on your desktop, navigate to IOBluetoothFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/BroadcomUSBBluetoothHCIController.kext/Contents/ (To get to the Contents folder, right click on the kext and select Show Package Contents)

3. Open info.plist in TextEdit.

4. Find and replace

<key>idProduct</key>
<integer>33292</integer>
<key>idVendor</key>
<integer>1452</integer>

with

<key>idProduct</key>
<integer>33062</integer>
<key>idVendor</key>
<integer>16700</integer>

5. Save the file.

6. Kext Helper the newly updated IOBluetoothFamily.kext. Also be sure to run a Tag Cache Rebuild.

7. Reboot.

You’ll now notice a new Turn Bluetooth Off option under the Bluetooth menu bar icon. Turning Bluetooth off both physically turns the Bluetooth hardware and the Bluetooth LED off.