Select your iPad from the list, and a new Mac Desktop appears on your iPad. At the bottom of the window is an AirPlay Display drop-down menu that offers the same connection options available in the menu bar. After a couple of seconds with a wired connection and a few seconds more when you connect wirelessly, your iPad will be up and running as a second display.Īnother way to connect your Mac to an iPad is from the Displays section of your Mac’s System Preferences. Selecting an iPad from the AirPlay menu initiates the connection, causing a brief flash of your Mac’s display. In the screenshot above, you can see an iPad called John’s iPad, which is my 12.9-inch iPad Pro. If you’re running Catalina on your Mac and iPadOS 13 on your iPad, click the AirPlay button, and in the drop-down menu you’ll see a section labeled ‘Connect to’ that includes any device in range to which you can AirPlay.įrom the ‘Connect to’ section of the AirPlay drop-down, you can start a Sidecar session with any nearby iPad. The first is from the AirPlay button in your Mac’s menu bar, which appears if you have the ‘Show mirroring options in the menu bar when available’ checkbox selected in the Displays section of your Mac’s System Preferences. Initiating a Sidecar session is as simple as using AirPlay. That’s because Sidecar creates a direct peer-to-peer connection over your WiFi network that doesn’t use the Internet as an intermediary. With a wireless connection, both devices must be connected to WiFi, but they don’t require an Internet connection. Connecting wirelessly works well too, but a wired connection is a little faster, and as a bonus, your iPad will charge while it’s connected to your Mac. Wired connections don’t require WiFi and support both Lightning and USB-C cables. Sidecar works both wirelessly and over a wired connection.
MAC TOUCH BAR APP SLACK 2018 PRO
Sidecar supports iMac 27” (Late 2015) or newer, MacBook Pro (2016) or newer, Mac mini (2018), Mac Pro (2019), MacBook Air (2018), MacBook (Early 2016 or newer). Apple hasn’t officially said which Macs will work with Sidecar, but they need to be running macOS Catalina and according to research by Steve Troughton-Smith: Sidecar is available on iPads running iPadOS 13.
However, to understand the potential Sidecar unlocks, it’s necessary to first dive into the details of what the new feature enables as well as its limitations. Combined with the ability to switch seamlessly between using Mac apps running in Sidecar and native iPadOS apps, what you’ve effectively got is a touchscreen Mac. At the same time, however, Sidecar takes advantage of functionality that’s unavailable on the Mac, like the Apple Pencil. Sidecar acknowledges those differences by letting an iPad become an extension of your Mac for tasks best suited to it. Some tasks are better suited for a Mac than an iPad and vice versa. Apple made it clear when they introduced Catalyst in 2018 at WWDC that it’s not replacing macOS with iOS. Sidecar strikes me as part of the same story.
In contrast, Catalyst is a shorter-term way to tie the Mac and iPad closer together by bringing iPad apps to the Mac and encouraging developers to build more robust iPad apps. As I’ve written in the past, SwiftUI is designed to accomplish that in the long-term across all the devices Apple makes. One of the themes that emerged from this year’s WWDC is deeper integration across all of Apple’s platforms. There’s more going on with Sidecar though, which didn’t dawn on me until I’d been using it for a while. Of course, there are differences that I’ll get into, but Sidecar is so close to a traditional dual-display setup that I expect it will become a natural extension of the way many people work on the Mac. The added screen real estate, portability, and functionality are part of the appeal too. Part of the reason is that running an iPad as a second display for a Mac with Sidecar is immediately familiar to anyone who has ever used multiple displays. The core experience of using Sidecar is fantastic.