iPhone Mirroring
Both macOS 15 and iOS 18 introduce iPhone Mirroring, which is a new way of interacting with your iPhone from your Mac. The feature lets you see and control your iPhone screen from your computer without having to touch your phone. You can also drag and drop files between macOS and the mirrored iPhone.
At least in beta 1, this feature is not available.
iPhone Mirroring steps things up considerably, allowing you to use your phone, see notifications, and use your apps—all from your Mac desktop. Because this is a Continuity feature, it does require that your iPhone be on the same WiFi network as your Mac and have Bluetooth enabled.
When you launch iPhone mirroring, your iPhone’s Home Screen appears in a window on the Mac desktop. From there you can use your keyboard and mouse/trackpad to navigate the phone, swiping between Home Screen pages, and launching and browsing apps.
I’m really looking forward to this, both so that I can access my phone when it’s locked and so that I can fly through tasks with the keyboard and mouse that would be awkward on the touch screen. Universal Clipboard helps but doesn’t go far enough.
iPhone Mirroring. Aka “I can finally post to Instagram from my Mac”
Bezel has done something like this before, but Apple uses their elevated position as the platform owner to take this to the next level.
This looks sick and is really cleverly done. The thing that gets me most excited is the ability to have notifications appear on my Mac and not just on my iPhone. The fact that clicking on that notification opens that on my iPhone on my Mac’s display is just awesome. And again, since Apple has elevated powers here, the fact that your phone screen remains off while all this is happening is just a cherry on top.
I can’t help but snark that Apple lets you use your iPhone with a mouse and everyone thinks it’s awesome, but touching a Mac remains beyond the pale and something only a fool would suggest 😉
So if I can control my phone from my Mac with a touchpad — wouldn’t it be cool if I could I dunno, control those apps on my Mac with a touch screen? What if I just got a touch screen on my Mac!
Previously:
- macOS 15 Sequoia Announced
- Universal Control
- iOS Apps Not Available in the Mac App Store
- iOS Apps on macOS 11
- Type2Phone
Update (2024-06-24): M.G. Siegler:
iPhone Mirroring on macOS Sequoia still may be the star of the entire show to me.
Also, how about we do the same thing with Mac Mirroring on an iPad?
Previously:
Update (2024-06-25): Juli Clover:
With the second developer beta of macOS Sequoia, Apple has added support for iPhone Mirroring, one of the main updates coming to the Mac.
Update (2024-07-01): George Garside:
By default, the iPhone Mirroring window on macOS Sequoia appears at actual size and cannot be resized. The frame of the iPhone with iOS 18 is not draggable and the size of the iPhone cannot be enlarged. However, it is possible to make the window larger through a hidden setting.
Update (2024-07-25): Juli Clover:
With the fourth beta of macOS Sequoia that came out today, Apple added a useful new feature to iPhone Mirroring.
I do have one question around iPhone mirroring… can you have multiple iPhones?
Previously:
Update (2024-10-08): Sevco Security (via Hacker News):
Sevco discovered a major systemic privacy bug whereby the applications from a user’s personal iPhone may become part of the company’s software inventory via a new Apple feature known as “iPhone Mirroring.”
In short, the applications on an employee’s personal iPhone may be exposed to their corporate IT department.
Update (2024-10-09): Rui Carmo (MacRumors):
My initial thought when reading this was “this is just stupid”. Then I thought about the added complexity involved over just mirroring the display, and I thought it was probably a great idea UX-wise (on the lines of Continuity), but, in the end, I still think it’s a profoundly stupid implementation, for the following reasons[…]
Update (2024-11-06): Cabel Sasser:
Using iPhone Mirroring just to listen to the Nintendo Music app on my Mac is an incredibly good trick
And as a bonus, after shrinking it down, it ALMOST feels like I’ve got a weird Audion skin running
8 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Now this one I'm actually really excited about. I've wondered about/wanted this in the past but never really looked it so wasn't aware that Bezel existed.
I think the difference between using a mouse+keyboard on your iPhone and using touch on a Mac is for the same reason that you, Michael, are excited about this--mouse+keyboard is often vastly more efficient than touch. (At work, we're talking about supporting a web version of our existing app, and quality engineering is guessing it will take 40%-60% as long to test on desktop as it does on the mobile app, even though the experience would be largely identical.)
And the entire OS (and apps, if they care about their users) would have to be redesigned around touch. Have you ever used a very information-dense iPhone app and cursed every time your finger was too wide and tapped on the wrong thing? Imagine that but with much smaller touch targets, and that is macOS as it currently exists.
That said, it would be really nifty if they would add the option to use the physical iPhone as a Magic Trackpad for a nearby Mac.
@Kevin I don’t personally care about touch on the Mac, but Apple’s principled position on this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. People aren’t asking for macOS to be redesigned around touch. It should stay high info density. They just want to use touch occasionally, for certain things. From what I’ve heard this works just fine on Windows.
Matthias, my dude, posting to Instagram from your Mac (or any computer) has been possible for a good while, namely from Safari (or any browser).
"At least in beta 1, this feature is not available."
Is anything available? This is very early 90s Apple.
Maybe if billions of dollars and countless hours hadn't been wasted on silly cars and pointless headsets there would be something to show.
Early 90s Apple would have slopped something together in much the same way Early 20s Microsoft is doing. I much prefer Apple take the time to do it at least mostly right. Microsoft debased itself and it still looks like it’s going to blow its head start.
There is “something to show.” It just isn’t all there on day zero. Feels like people need to be retaught this every single beta cycle.
@BillyOK What is the point of showing all that vaporware (anything is vaporware until it can be used by people), if it is not ready? Especially in a developer conference. Releasing something broken is not good, but neither is just showing half-truths in a hand-waving video. If it’s not ready now, don’t show it. If it’s actually almost ready early next year, announce it then and release betas that have it, so actual developers can prepare for it. You know, what a “deverloper” “conference” is supposed to be, instead of a “*wink* *wink* pls don’t kill our stock, we haev AI too!!1” nonsense that was this year’s WWDC.
I'm curious what they'll do to avoid duplicate notifications. Surely they'll at least have something for iMessage, but I'm worried about third-party apps. A simple text comparison should work well enough (combined with matching the apps' developer across both platforms, since bundle ID may differ), hopefully they'll do it.
