The lyrics from the timeless Pilot song were ringing in my ears today…
Oh, ho, ho, it's magic, you know
Never believe it's not so
It's magic, you know
Never believe it's not so
It is not often that I enjoy truly groundbreaking technology that pushes the boundaries of simple elegant implementation that is simply phenomenal. I have never been excited about something like this in a long time. Something that I would probably use every day of my life - as I spend a lot of time both work and personal on computers every day.
It was a feature called Universal Control launched today in MacOS 12.3 with matching components in iPadOS 15.4. The feature allows a single mouse and keyboard to connect to one Mac computer to seamlessly integrate and use the same mouse and keyboard with nearby Mac computers and iPads. And it worked like magic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
— Arthur C Clarke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
I had already been using the beta version of this on my Mac mini and my iPad for the last couple of weeks. But the real magic was today when I also installed the final Release candidate version on my work MacBook (I normally don’t install beta versions on work computers). I could seamlessly use the keyboard and mouse on my work machine with both my Mac Mini and my iPad Pro with just a flick of my wrist whilst crossing over the edge of my monitor. I could even drag and drop documents between the devices effortlessly.
Thanks, Apple - you made my day today!
More details at:
macOS Monterey introduces powerful features to get more done — https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2021/06/macos-monterey-introduces-powerful-features-to-get-more-done/