Hands-On With Universal Control in iPadOS 15.4 and macOS Monterey 12.3

[Analog Kid]

„through iCloud“ or just being confirmed by Apple ID?
do data transferred be sent to iCloud? I can’t believe this is true…

No, high rate data isn’t sent through iCloud. Audio from you phone isn’t passing through the cloud on its way to your Airpods. iCloud is being used for key management for BT pairing. I don’t know exactly how it’s implemented, but I don’t think your AppleID is being used with the BT device, I think the BT pairing data is shared through the cloud.

My point was just that if you don’t want to need the machines signed into a common iCloud account, but want it handled more like Bluetooth, then there really isn’t much difference in the Apple ecosystem. Apple‘s approach is to use iCloud to manage Bluetooth.

I can force pair my AirPods with a different device, but that’s for compatibility with non-Apple devices. I don’t see why Apple would put the effort into supporting a different approach when both devices must be running Apple operating systems to begin with…

 

[CopyChief]

I don’t want to download the beta so soon so a can’t test it, but if I’m on an iPad normally with a mouse connected to it, you can show the Home Screen by going to the bottom of the screen and continuing after the dock comes up. If that’s not working now, then It’s probably a bug with Universal Control.

This does seem to work on the latest (RC) betas.

 

[fpnc]

I've had intermittent problems with Sidecar between my first generation iPad Pro and my M1-based MacBook Air so I'm not holding out much hope that Universal Control will work reliably (wireless is still pretty flaky, IMO).

In any case, Sidecar is a lot more useful than Universal Control (for me) so here's hoping that they will eventually make Sidecar work as it should (day after day). Plus many apps don't work very well with Sidecar, including Apple's own Music app and Adobe's Photoshop.

In the case of Photoshop trying to use Sidecar can result in unusable save and save as dialogs, they either get displayed incorrectly or not displayed at all (so in some cases you are locked out of trying to save a document until you disable Sidecar). The latter is probably Adobe's fault (bug), but I've seen similar weirdness in Apple's own Music app.

Meanwhile, Mac OS screen sharing (over ethernet) works like a champ between my MacBook Air and a quite old core i7 Mac mini. But, a rock-solid Sidecar is what I'm really after, since that allows me to have two external displays for my M1 MacBook Air.

I just wanted to report that after the latest software updates to both my M1 MacBook Air and my first generation iPad Pro that Sidecar seems to be working much better. In fact, it now seems to work very reliably over WiFi which is something that never worked before the updates.

This is with Mac OS Monterey v12.3 and iOS v15.4. The latter also added support for Universal Control which I have not yet tried and now that Sidecar is working it would be kind of nice to be able to use the keyboard and mouse -- over WiFi -- to the iPad OS). But, Sidecar is working very well when before it was practically a basket case on my first generation iPad Pro (and I'm running on what I think is the absolute low end of support in terms of hardware).

But, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished because now I'm having keyboard and mouse issues when running Microsoft's Remote Desktop. But, that MAY have something to do with some USB switcher hardware that I recently added to my system.

 

[fpnc]

Well, that didn't last too long. After just reporting that Sidecar was working reliably over WiFi for the first time ever I'm now into day three or four and it has again stopped working when connecting over WiFi. It connects initially but then freezes after a short minute or two. However, it never reports that the connection has dropped, the video just stops...

Okay, it seems to be back after I did a forced reboot of the iPad (a reboot of the MacBook didn't fix the problem). Don't know if this was a rare or one-time failure. That said, I've seen similar wireless problems under iOS before, both on my iPad and iPhone SE. Every few months or so I've had to do a forced reboot to get things like Personal Hot Spot to work, when trying to communicate between two devices.

So, maybe these devices just need a reboot now and then to keep things running smoothly. But, I'd really like Sidecar to work over WiFi since that allows me to have three active displays for my MacBook Air. I've also tried Universal Control and I can't really see much use for that, at least given my current setup (one Universal Control enabled Mac and one iPad).

I've also been using the Apple Pencil with Sidecar and that is another nice feature. Using Photoshop brushes to draw on a Sidecar-displayed image using the Apple Pencil is quite useful.