Universal Control in the Newest MacOS and iPadOS Betas ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

The iPadOS 15.4 and macOS Monterey 12.3 betas that Apple released today introduce support for Universal Control, the long-awaited feature that’s designed to allow multiple Macs and iPads to be controlled with a single mouse and keyboard.

There are Universal Control settings available on both the Mac and the iPad, and the feature is enabled by default after updating to the new betas. On the Mac, the settings can be found under Displays > Advanced, and on the iPad, the AirPlay & Handoff section under General has a new “Cursor and Keyboard (Beta)” option.

Notably, these settings come with a “beta” label within the developer seed of MacOS, which suggests to me that Universal Control will launch as a beta even when the software ships to consumers.

I hope that does not come as a downer. In all of the demos I have seen so far, it works like magic. You may have seen Federico Viticci’s preview on Twitter. A friend of mine in Slack posted a video of them dragging a photo from a Mac, through an iPad, to copy it onto a different Mac. And it apparently requires no setup, though you may wish to check the hardware requirements.

If Universal Control ships with this level of quality to end users, it is an absolute jewel in Apple’s cross-device functionality crown.