Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Yosemite Edition

AirPlay

If you’d shown this new feature to the masses in 2005 or so, they’d have fallen down and worshiped it as a god. With one click, you can send whatever is on your Mac’s screen to your TV’s screen, in hi-def. No wires. In Yosemite, you can make the TV either a mirror of your Mac’s screen or an extension of it.

You can present photo slideshows on the TV from your laptop. Or play movies you’ve found online. Or give presentations from PowerPoint or Keynote. Or present software lessons to a class.

This trick requires both a fairly recent Mac model (mid-2011 or later) and an Apple TV. That’s a tiny, $90 black box that connects to a hi-def TV and lets you watch videos from services like YouTube, Netflix, MLB.TV, NBA, NHL, and Vimeo. It can also play videos, music, and photos from Macs or PCs on the network.

But with AirPlay, the Apple TV (and therefore your TV) can now play anything you can see on your Mac, including services like Hulu that aren’t available on the Apple TV alone. You can play your iTunes music while watching those cool screensavery visualizers on your HDTV. And you can carry your Apple TV around with you to corporate boardrooms to project your pitches, rather than a $1,500 projector.

Tip

If the Apple TV is the third generation or later, the two machines don’t even have to be on the same wireless network. This feature, called peer-to-peer AirPlay, is terrific. It makes life so much simpler when you want to give a presentation at some company or school whose WiFi network ...