Universal Control

Has anyone tried Universal Control yet? I can’t seem to get it working. According to Apple there is no set up and both my M1 and Intel Macbooks/Air are supported, and M1 iPad Pro. What am I missing?

According to Macworld there are some very specific requirements. Are you meeting all of these?

  • All devices must be signed in to iCloud with the same Apple ID using two-factor authentication.

  • For wireless connectivity, all devices must have Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Handoff turned on and within 30 feet of each other.

  • iPad and Mac cannot be sharing a cellular and internet connection.

  • For USB connections, you must trust your Mac on the iPad.

Here’s the list of Macs can initiate Universal Control:

  • MacBook Pro (2016 and later)
  • MacBook (2016 and later)
  • MacBook Air (2018 and later)
  • iMac (2017 and later)
  • iMac (5K Retina 27-inch, Late 2015)
  • Mac mini (2018 and later)
  • iMac Pro
  • Mac Pro 2019

As for iPads, it’ll work with:

  • iPad Pro
  • iPad Air (3rd generation and later)
  • iPad (6th generation and later)
  • iPad mini (5th generation and later)
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All of those boxes are checked.

Huh… nothing I’ve read suggested this feature wasn’t supposed to be available today… so I think it should work.

No developer account, so I haven’t tried it myself.

It’s not working wired either. :man_shrugging: I’m sure it will eventually. Like you said in the other post, this is day one of a dev beta, so I can’t expect everything to work perfectly.

It may sound a bit funny, but I think the only thing you can expect is that potentially everything will NOT work perfectly. It is the release of the first DEVELOPER beta. That is more like Alpha than Beta, to be honest. :slight_smile:

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I understand that. I’m just communicating my experiences so far with the new beta.

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I’ve read that Universal Control is not included in the Developer’s beta yet according to a 9to5mac article.

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That’s correct. It’s not in Dev Beta 1.

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Revisiting this for the public beta 1 - I’m unable to initiate Universal control between my 2017 Macbook pro and my iPad pro - both running public beta 1 of their respective OS. I think I’ve met all the criteria of the same wifi, same apple ID signed in and they are about 1.5 inches apart.

I’ll keep watching to see if others have gotten this to work.

It is still early days.

yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. Oh well, there are plenty of other things to check out. Thanks for the post.

Can’t wait to try this now that I have two Macbooks (keeping my old one for a while) and an iPad. Turns out you can’t use Airplay extended desktop and Sidecar concurrently so I can’t make use of the three machines at once with one keyboard.

How’s it working and how’s everyone using it?

It’s working fine as of now. I haven’t encountered any bugs really. My only complaint is that if you have an iPad placed on the left side of the Mac, then you can’t (at least when using Magic Mouse) open the multitasking view for slide over (the mouse pointer moves to the Mac).

There’s also the fact that a few things become broken when natural scrolling is disabled. For example, swipe to delete (eg. an email) is handled in an opposite way compared to the Mac. It really slows me down. This option is seriously broken on iPadOS (and a little bit on macOS, while we’re at it).

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Last beta, Universal Control is not working when you place it on the other side of an extra display (mine is vertical). Today I was able to make it work. The speed of the mouse on the iPad is slower though.

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