Well, the really cool feature Universal Control where you can just have one keyboard and work across multiple Apple devices isn’t yet here. It turns out it less magical than you think but still awesomely cool. So even without this new feature you can use your iPad as a second screen. Pretty valuable when you are remote computing and don’t have a big monitor available. But there are lots of prerequisites that called Sidecar by Apple explains patiently:
- First you need to have an iPad Pro and a late model MacBook Pro 2016 or later.
- On MacOS Monterey, you can see if this works by going to the control panel on the upper right can clicking the arrow on the Displays menu and you should see connect to and it should list your iPad.
- When this works, you will see the display extended and on the left are the various option keys and you can use your apple pencil on your iPad to input into the Mac. So you basically get a nice input system for your Mac apps.
- It says that you can use the iPad keyboard and touchpad as well, but I couldn’t quite get that to work.
However, the system is picky on making this work, specifically you need:
- Both devices signed into the same iCloud account for security reasons.
- And the account has to use two factor authentication.
- Now both devices have to have Bluetooth (this is how they sense they are close together), WiFi (which is how they send data and screens back and forth)
- The thing that got me is that *neither* can be using sharing a cellular connection as a hotspot on the iPad nor can you share your Wifi connection on your Mac.
- The WiFi connection has to be to the same network so if one is say logged onto a guest network that can’t see your home network it won’t work.
It is the last one that got me. Turn off that hotspot stuff.
