Handoff does not work on a 2 1/2 year old MacBook Air

As I do a lots of fieldwork I was looking forward to using the new handoff feature in Yosemite which would allow me to transfer my work from my iPad to my 2 1/2 year old MacBook Air. I have now discovered that my laptop is too old for this feature. Why? This smacks of built-in obsolescence.

This is a user-to-user support forum, so we can't usually explain the "why" of many Apple decisions, although you may get some educated guesses from someone here. You can provide feedback to Apples at https://www.apple.com/feedback/ if you like.
May not help, but my MacBook Air is a mid-2012 model that is supposed to support Handoff but I've yet to get it to work in spite of meticulously following all of the instructions.
Also may not help, but I don't really care if I don't get it to work as all it would seem to do is very slightly reduce the number of steps to open a document on the other device. Without Handoff I can start a document in Pages on my MacBook Air, save to iCloud then go to my iPhone and open Pages and resume editing there. You may already be aware of that -- and you may have more need or use of Handoff than I do -- but thought I would point that out just in case you were thinking Handoff provided more capabilities than it does.

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Hi!
First of all I have a Macbook Pro 15" Retina late 2013 (bought at in the first months of 2014) and and iPhone 5s.
rMBP has installed OS X Yosemite since yesterday and my iPhone iOS 8.0.2
Positiv checks:
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- both devices are on the same wi-fi network
- rMBP support handoff and instant hotspot as displayed in system information screen
- rMBP could "out call" over facetime and my iPhone to anyone
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- handoff in settings -> generall -> handoff & ... ist activated on iPhone too
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- in bluetooth settings both devices see each other, but they cannot connect to each other
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if I try to connect bluetooth from iPhone to rMBP I get: connections failed
so what can I do to pair/connect them both to each other for these incredible handoff features I want to use?
things I tried out:
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- switching airdrop off and on on both devices
- switching bluetooth off and on on both devices
- clearing bluetooth device cach on rMBP and fresh select (pairing) in the settings
- multiple trys on my iPhone to connect with my rMBP
- resetting network settings on iPhone
- resetting all settings on iPhone
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yes, there is an additional troubleshooting for your iPhone.
- be sure that you have still OS X Yosemite and iOS 8.0.2 or later (8.1 on Monday) installed on your devices
- on iOS goto settings -> generall -> scroll down to reset settings (last option on general screen) -> reset all network settings
- be sure to reconnect to the same WI-FI after you did that
- be sure to activate Bluetooth
- be sure that Handoff ist activated on your iPhone (Settings -> General -> Handoff)
- be sure your MBP ist on the same WI-FI (same bandwith as well, for example both devices have to be on 2,4 GHz)
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and than reconnect to iCloud on your iPhone 5c
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and reset all settings, do the same as before
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your iPhone should NOT be shown in the list of available Bluetooth devices.
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Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
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Handoff does not work on a 2 1/2 year old MacBook Air

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