Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Yosemite Edition

Chapter 14. Mac+iPhone: Handoff, AirDrop & Continuity

Apple products have always been designed to work together. Macs, phones, tablets, watches: similar software, design, wording, philosophy. That’s nice for you, of course, because you have less to learn and to troubleshoot. But it’s also nice for Apple, because it keeps you in velvet handcuffs; pretty soon, you’ve got too much invested in its own product “ecosystem” to ever consider wandering over to a rival.

In Yosemite, Apple has taken this gadget symbiosis to an astonishing extreme. If your iPhone is running iOS 8.1 or later, it can be an accessory to your Mac. The Mac can be a speakerphone, using the iPhone as a wireless antenna. The Mac can send and receive regular text messages. AirDrop lets you drag files back and forth, wirelessly, from phone to computer. A Mac laptop can get onto the Internet with one click, even miles from home.

Apple’s name for this suite of symbiosis is Continuity. For many people, all of this just works. For many others, there’s a certain degree of setting up and troubleshooting. These are the primary rules:

• You need a Mac running OS X Yosemite and an iPhone running iOS 8.1 or later.

• The Mac and the phone have to be signed into the same iCloud account. (That’s a security thing—it proves that you’re the owner of both machines, and therefore unlikely to pose a risk to yourself.) On the Mac, you do that in System Preferences→iCloud. On the phone, you do that in Settings→iCloud, but also make sure that you’ve ...