Getting "Apple Watch to unlock" working on a new M1 MBP

Hardware
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I just bought a new M1 MBP and the only problem I’m having so far is that I cannot, for the life of me, get the “Use your Apple Watch to unlock” feature working.

I should mention that rather than migrating my old system and it’s decade+ crufty filesystem, I decided to start with a blank slate and just manually config and install only what I need. Besides doing all the typical steps of restarting wifi, bluetooth and rebooting on both devices, I have tried the previously mentioned fix, all to no avail. No matter what I do, I keep getting the dreaded, “Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch” message when attempting to enable this preference. I am so puzzled because I have a really barebones system right now. Like, there’s a little over 20 apps installed total, Apple ones included.

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

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Besides all that, I can only think of signing out and in of iCloud. I really think it’ll mysteriously fix itself after awhile, though, based on having gone through similar phases.

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Congrats on the new laptop!
Puzzling.
Is your phone on the same Wi-Fi as your laptop?
My thinking is that the phone might inform the watch of Wi-Fi credentials, so would need to be on the same network as the laptop.

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@JohnAtl I know, right? I do have two networks at home and that was one of the first things I double-checked.

@cornchip Not a bad idea! I’ll try this.

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I did a migration to a new M1 MacBook a couple of days ago and still had the same problem when I tried to set up the watch today. Took a couple of tries and it worked after I tried restarting the watch and also toggling the wifi and cellular connections on and off. It’s happened to me with prior setups too so I think there’s some bug. Works now though.

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If you tried every possible mean to troubleshoot, this would be a great time to call on the ‘genius’ from Apple, especially it is a new flashy MBP

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I had the same issue with my Apple Watch and my M1 16” MBP. The error message that I found indicated that I was not signed in to iCloud on my watch.

Fortunately, last week’s developer’s beta fixed the issue.

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Update: Went to my old MacBook (Just bought an M1) and found that now the Apple Watch unlock was disabled and I got the error again a few times. Ignored it for 5 minutes and came back again and it worked. Not sure what’s causing this but its an issue that Apple needs to take care of since its been happening forever.

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Meanwhile, I’ve also tried signing in and out of iCloud and re-pairing my Watch. Nothing still. I should have time to call Apple today and go through the troubleshooting process. Will report back.

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I have a new 16" MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip. My watch does unlock the laptop, but I do get regular messages throughout the day that the signal from the watch is not strong enough for the watch to communicate with the laptop. When this is happening it will work if I hold my watch right next to the laptop. It does. not always happen. Never had this issue with my old 2017 MacBook Pro. I am running the public beta so it could be related to that.

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Ok, after iCloud sign-out and repairing, I tried reconnecting and it didn’t work. But just now it did for the first time and the auto-login seems to be working? Something tells me it was the re-pairing of the Watch that did it, but it still took a couple tries of trying to connect the Watch to the laptop.

Crossing my fingers it will stay working.

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