iPhone: The Missing Manual, 13th Edition

Chapter 17. Continuity: iPhone Meets Mac

Apple products have always been designed to work together. Macs, phones, tablets, watches: They all have similar software, design, wording, and philosophy. That’s nice for you, of course, because you have less to learn and to troubleshoot. But it’s also nice for Apple, because it keeps you in velvet handcuffs; pretty soon, you’ve got too much invested in its product “ecosystem” to consider wandering over to a rival.

Apple has taken this gadget symbiosis to an astonishing extreme. Today, your Mac can be an accessory to your iPhone. The Mac can be a speakerphone, using the iPhone as a wireless antenna. The Mac can send and receive regular text messages. AirDrop lets you drag files back and forth, wirelessly, from phone to computer. You can copy material on the phone and paste it on the Mac (or vice versa).

Apple’s name for this suite of symbiosis is Continuity. And once you’ve got it set up, the game changes in a big way.

Continuity Setup

For many people, this all just works. For many others, there’s a certain degree of setting up and troubleshooting. These are the primary rules:

• You need a Mac running OS X Yosemite or later.

• The Mac and the phone have to be signed into the same iCloud account. (That’s a security thing—it proves you’re the owner of both machines and therefore unlikely to pose a risk.) On the Mac, you do that in System Preferences → iCloud. On the phone, you do it in Settings → [your name] → iCloud. But you should also make ...