What you need to know
- It's possible to enable Universal Control in the latest macOS Monterey beta by running some Terminal commands.
- Universal Control only works with Macs right now, suggesting whatever the delay is, it's on the iPad side.
- Universal Control was announced at WWDC in June but is yet to officially ship in any macOS or iPadOS betas.
Those waiting for Universal Control to be added to macOS Monterey and iOS 15 are in luck — there's a way to force it to work in the latest Monterey beta. But before anyone gets too excited, there's one big caveat — it only works with Macs.
Announced during WWDC in June, Universal Control is supposed to allow people to use their mouse and keyboard across both a Mac and an iPad and that's how it was demonstrated at the time. However, the feature has been absent ever since, and with macOS Monterey and iOS 12 now just weeks away from release some are concerned it might not make the big day. But it turns out the Mac portion of Universal Control is need ready to go, with a some command line magic enabling it.
As reported by MacRumors, a GitHub post outlines exactly what you need to do to get Universal Control up and running. However, it will only work on a Mac-to-Mac basis right now, suggesting the issue causing Apple's silence could be on the iPad's side. However, it's also possible that we could enable the feature on iPadOS if we had access to its underpinnings which we do not.
I wouldn't recommend anyone actually tries this, but I've linked to the GitHub post for those who want to take a look around. Hopefully Apple will enable all of this properly sooner rather than later.
Apple has a big few weeks on its hands with the iPhone 13 announcement set to kick things off next month. Despite not being a big refresh year for Apple, we can bet that we will still get the best iPhone ever soon enough. Add the upcoming Apple Watch Series 7 to the mix and we could be in for some big announcements pretty soon indeed.
