"Your Mac is unable to communicate with your Apple Watch"

[Ethosik]

Worked fine on the same iMac with Catalina before the upgrade. Now I cannot get my Mac to unlock with my Apple Watch. Everything is up to date. iPhone, Watch and iMac. Yet since the Big Sur update, I cannot get my Mac to communicate with my watch. Another reason to wait to upgrade if you have not done so.

 

[Rob Robinson]

Yes, I have the same problem. Has been there since the first RC of Big Sur and persists through a reinstall.

I've seen elsewhere a recommendation to disable handoff and re-enable, but that made no difference to me.

Hoping it's something that will be fixed in a release in the next few days.

 

[MarkVeldhuis]

Does this help?

 

[KennethS]

What worked for me was to unpair my watch from my phone and then re-pair it (I restored from the backup on the phone created during the unpair). It seems to be working fine now on both a 2020 MBA and 2018 Mac mini. It is also now working with 1Password.

 

[Rob Robinson]

Does this help?

Thank you - I gave that a go, sadly it didn't work for me; however, I think I may have another underlying issue with my hardware because I ended up in a reboot loop.

Boots up > Choose user > Enter password > Progress bar for 90 seconds > Kernel Panic and reboot

SMC / NVRAM reset etc no go so I ended up in Internet Recovery and wiping the system. I'm on a 2020 Mac Mini high spec, but anything related to accessing the SSD e.g. install time or post-recovery from time machine is taking much longer than normal.

No Apple Genius bar appointments available anywhere so will be a call to AppleCare and a courier to collect.

 

[VineRider]

What worked for me was to unpair my watch from my phone and then re-pair it (I restored from the backup on the phone created during the unpair). It seems to be working fine now on both a 2020 MBA and 2018 Mac mini. It is also now working with 1Password.

This worked for me as well

 

[Rob Robinson]

What worked for me was to unpair my watch from my phone and then re-pair it (I restored from the backup on the phone created during the unpair). It seems to be working fine now on both a 2020 MBA and 2018 Mac mini. It is also now working with 1Password.

Now my system has completely restored, I followed this approach and mine also works.

Thank you