If Your IPhone Was On Wi-fi

Apple has a definite tendency to get its devices working well with each other before considering such distractions as Android or Windows, and over the years the iPhone and the Mac have built up a strong understanding. You might not appreciate just how many different ways they can seamlessly work together—here’s what you need to know. Not all of these features have always worked all that well, but as time has gone on, Apple has managed to get them up to a respectable level of intuitiveness and stability.

What you need to begin are an iPhone running iOS 11 and a 2012 or later Mac running macOS High Sierra, both signed into the same iCloud account with the same credentials. The Universal Clipboard is exactly what it sounds like: Copy and paste that works across your iPhone and your Mac. C), and then switch over to your iPhone, in an app like Notes.

Tap and hold on the screen to bring up the pop-up menu, choose Paste, and your text should appear. It works in the other direction too, of course, and with images as well—so you could, for example, paste something that you’ve got in Photos on your iPhone right into a document in Pages, no middle steps required.

In iMovie for iOS, tap the Projects tab, and choose the project you want to use. Hit the Share button, and you’ve got two options: You can select iCloud Drive (which passes the project via iCloud Drive and keeps a copy there) or wait for your Mac to show up in the AirDrop panel. In both cases you have the chance to share either the iMovie project as a whole (timelines and elements and all), or the finished movie generated from your assembled clips, which will be exported if you choose this option.

For those times when you don’t have regular wi-fi available, or it’s too flaky, or you don’t think it’s secure enough, this is simple to use. The wi-fi password for the hotspot is included here too, if you’ve got other devices to connect. Toggle the Personal Hotspot option on to make the connection available.

Click the wi-fi symbol on the menu bar on your Mac, choose the iPhone entry, and the rest happens automatically. If your iPhone was on wi-fi, it gets disabled, so your phone falls back to a cellular connection. Choose Disconnect from iPhone from the wi-fi drop-down to end the tethering.

You can also connect via Bluetooth or via a cabled connection. From Settings on iOS, tap Phone, then Wi-Fi Calling, then turn the Wi-Fi Calling on This Phone toggle switch to on. Head to your Mac, open FaceTime, and you might get automatically prompted to allow calls from your iPhone.

If not, open the FaceTime menu and choose Preferences. Check the box marked Calls From iPhone. Making calls from FaceTime on macOS is easy—just enter a name, email address, or phone number into the search box at the top to find the person you want to call. Receiving calls isn’t much more difficult: Whenever someone calls your iPhone, you’ll see Accept and Decline buttons in the corner of your Mac display, so make your choice accordingly.

In Settings, tap Messages then Text Message Forwarding and activate your Mac (if the option doesn’t appear, check that you’re signed into iCloud on both devices, with the right phone number registered). Your entire SMS history won’t get synced over, but any texts sent and received after you’ve enabled the feature appear automatically.

With that done, you’re ready to start doing some handing off. You can share maps, websites, text, images, and more, so you might prefer using AirDrop to Handoff in certain situations. Recording screen activity from an iOS device on macOS is very simple as well—you just need to connect the devices via USB, open up QuickTime and start recording. Look for another round of integrations to crop up when we get iOS 12 later in the year.