(upbeat music)
- Okay, Apple's WWDC 2021 keynote is wrapped.
Now this keynote happened in the midst of a huge focus
on Apple's App Store policies.
And there's been a lot of developer unrest,
and Apple didn't really talk about any of that,
and that's to be expected.
And besides, Apple had too much other stuff
to actually get through.
MacOs Monterey, iPadOS 15,
iOS 15,
watchOS,
health stuff, privacy stuff, HomeKit stuff,
stuff, a lot of stuff, but some of it is really good stuff.
But there is this one particular demo
that was definitely the highlight of the whole keynote.
It's called Universal Control.
And what it lets you do is use one Mac's keyboard
to control an iPad or
a second Mac.
It's actually easier to watch it than to have me explain it,
so, here, just watch it.
- Without any other setup, I'm gonna simply move
my Mac cursor towards my iPad,
and the iPad automatically recognizes it.
And if I move a bit further, boom,
my cursor is now on the iPad.
How cool is that?
I can even drag and drop files between my devices.
I'm just gonna take this drawing I finished on my iPad
and drop it on the Keynote on my Mac.
Awesome.
- So that's pretty cool, right?
Now, I know that a lot of the stuff in iOS 15
might be more important than this demo,
so I have a lot of things to say about these new Focus Mode,
Profile things, and even more to say
about the new multitasking model on the iPad
'cause I think Apple may have just kind of given up on it
a little bit.
But right now, I wanna talk about
this Universal Control demo because it's very cool,
and I think it's cool for a particular reason.
So here's a question.
How on earth does this thing even work?
Now, what I wanna do here is go through this demo video
step-by-step and analyze what's happening here.
Now, you should know before we get started
that all of these computers
have to be on the same iCloud account,
because, you know, Apple ecosystem.
Here we go.
So first, you set an iPad next to a Mac.
And the two computers know that they're close to each other
'cause they both have Bluetooth on the same iCloud account.
It's the same thing that enables Handoff.
Then you take your mouse on the Mac
and drag it over to the left or right edge of the screen.
And then it seems to know the iPad's position somehow,
maybe, that's what I thought.
But actually, no.
Apple tells me that the Mac just assumes
that there's an iPad over on the left or the right
of the Mac screen when you drag your mouse over
to the left or the right edge of your Mac screen,
and actually, just a little bit beyond it.
And then this really clever thing happens.
This bar appears on the iPad.
And if you look closely,
you'll see there's some little arrows on the bar.
And what those arrows do is they align your two displays
so you can drag it up and down,
and make sure that when you drag your mouse over,
it's in a natural spot.
And then, bam, you basically got a KVM switch.
Your trackpad and keyboard work with the iPad.
But that's not really the magical part,
the magical part is drag and drop works
from iPadOS to the Mac and vice versa.
It's kind of just like Airdrop, but it's better,
'cause you're literally dragging and dropping over the air.
It uses wifi direct, or if you have a USB connection,
it can do it over USB to be just a little bit faster.
And then after that, they just added another Mac to the mix,
because why not?
You can have up to three devices
using this Universal Control system.
So this is all great,
but if you can connect up to three devices,
how does the Mac know which one to connect to
the first time you drag your mouse over
to the edge of the screen?
Well, it just guesses.
It figures you wanna use the last device
that you interacted with.
So if the last thing you touched was the iPad,
it'll be the iPad.
If the last thing you touched was the other Mac,
it will be the other Mac.
But you can set up a permanent Universal Control buddy
if you want in the system preferences
so it always goes to that one.
So on the one hand, this honestly does seem
like a pretty simple feature for Apple to make.
I mean, Apple devices have communicated
through Continuity forever,
and this is just handing off a different piece
of information, mouse position, and keyboard and stuff.
But this demo, it's so seamless and easy,
that's the magical part.
And I could be wrong, but I think that this feature
could not have happened if Apple hadn't been laying
the groundwork for years on both the Mac and the iPad.
So let's start with the iPad.
(upbeat bright music)
So the first set of features to talk about are Airdrop,
Continuity, and Handoff.
These are the core ways
that the iPad can communicate wirelessly to a Mac.
Then there's multitasking on the iPad.
And that seems like a weird thing to include
because split screen, whatever.
But the important part here is drag and drop
was part of multi window on the iPad.
And so that works across multiple apps on the iPad
and it also works here.
Then of course, there is keyboard and mouse support
on the iPad.
It started as an accessibility feature,
but then Apple made it a core, top of feature
for everybody with the Magic Keyboard.
Finally, there's Sidecar.
This is a feature that lets you use your iPad
as a second monitor for your Mac wirelessly.
So you've been able to throw your mouse from a Mac
to an iPad for a while now, but, this is different
because in this new feature, the iPad is running iPadOS,
but, I don't know, I kinda feel like maybe Apple
learned some things about how to do low latency
keyboard and mouse stuff from the Mac to the iPad
over Sidecar.
Without any of these features on the iPad.
this demo doesn't happen.
So that's one branch, that is the iPad.
Now let's talk about the other branch, the Mac.
(upbeat music)
My hunch is that some of this magic
was based on all of the iPad type things
that have been happening on the Mac
over the past few years.
There are catalyst apps.
They came first, they're sort of like half iPad apps
and they're bad.
Then there are native iPad apps on the M1 Mac,
which I thought could be another building block, but,
(Dieter sighs)
nah, I asked Apple, and Apple told me
that this is pretty much a straight line
from Continuity and Handoff.
And there's no extra magic from all those iPad guts
that are increasingly part of the Mac, which,
by the way, Shortcuts and new Focus Modes
are also coming to the Mac,
so it's not that bad of a hunch
to think that there's more iPad stuff going on in the Mac,
and that was part of the story, yeah?
(Dieter sighs)
Look, sometimes our hypothesis isn't exactly right.
Science.
(dramatic music)
And so, I think that this was the best demo
coming out of WWDC.
And also, I think we can learn some things from it.
First, I really do think that the Mac and the iPad
really are coming closer and closer and closer and closer
to each other.
No, you can't run Mac apps on an iPad pro with the M1 chip,
but you can drag a file from the Mac to the iPad.
And like I said, I think the Mac
is getting more and more iPad features like Focus Mode,
and Shortcuts, and Control Panel, and so on and so on.
Does that mean that I think these two platforms
are going to merge?
Nah, I think Apple fundamentally doesn't wanna do that.
Just like it fundamentally refuses to offer multi-user
on the iPad or put a touch screen on the Mac.
Look, sometimes when I'm using an iPad,
I get annoyed by some limitation on the OS,
and then I set it down and then I redo the entire setup
on my Mac to get started again.
But now, well, there's just more opportunities
to use an iPad and a Mac together.
So if I'm doing something on an iPad and I'm annoyed by it,
I just drag it over to the Mac and keep going,
because switching between them has just gotten a lot easier.
But to me, the most important part of this demo
is that it is possible to make really great features
just by thinking creatively about how to use the tools
and features that you have already built.
Technically speaking, Apple didn't really invent anything
radically hard or even especially new
with Universal Control.
It just made very clever use of the technologies
that it had already invented before.
And that's cool.
So here's the thought that I'm gonna leave you with.
Look at all of the things that you've learned
in your life and take a step back from them,
and think about how you could use those skills
in newer, clever ways.
You might surprise yourself.
Hey, everybody, thanks so much for watching.
If you missed the keynote, we have a supercut
that's got all of Apple's announcements
in a compact 20 something minutes.
And let me know down in the comments,
was this your favorite feature
or did you like something else?
Maybe you did.