danielleamya:
If it helps at all, I was able to connect my HC-08 to my iPhone with the app Bluetooth Serial Lite, but that app does not exist for MacOS.
It doesn't help one little bit. As I understand it, HC-05 is fine with macOS, but it is incompatible with IOS. IOS only works with BT4 and HC-08 is one of those, but that proves nothing - except that there is nothing wrong with it. Having said that, you should be able to use BT4 on the mac. It might be that the reason why you can't is the same as that for the HC-05.
There is a faint hope that your problem is simply procedural, i.e. something silly. If you stick with the HC-05 and can use a plain vanilla terminal programme, you might find the following background notes useful.
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~npyner/Arduino/GUIDE_2BT.pdf
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~npyner/Arduino/BT_2_WAY.ino