Universal Control Hands-on: The Magic Comes Alive

Once it's set up, it simply works.

- By Roman Loyola

The macOS 12.3 (fave.co/3DSONH) and iPadOS 15.4 betas were recently released to developers, and there was a surprise: Apple finally added Universal Control, the much-anticipated feature that was revealed at WWDC21. Late last year Apple announced that the release of Universal Control would be delayed to this spring, so we didn't expect to see any trace of it until at least March.

For the uninitiated, Universal Control allows you to use an iPad as an external display for a Mac. During the demo in the WWDC keynote, Apple VP Craig Federighi merely placed the iPad next to his Mac, and it worked. No cables to connect, no restarting, no need to click anything or say please”—it just connected and worked like magic.

And from my initial experience, after you set it all up, it does work like magic, even in this first beta form.

A sidebar appears when you're making an initial connection between the Mac and iPad.

CONNECTING THE IPAD AND MAC

Before you can get to the magic, there's a little bit of setup involved on the Mac. Universal Control is turned on by default on the Mac and the iPad, but you'll need to head over to the Display pane in System Preferences and select Add Display to select your iPad. You don't have to do anything else on the iPad, but Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Handoff need to all be turned on. The whole operation is extremely easy-you don't really need to pay attention to the iPad at all.