Phone mirroring on the Mac might change how you use your phone

One of the surprise hits of Apple’s WWDC 2024 was a new feature for desktops and laptops. In Sequoia, the new operating system due this fall and now in public beta, you can mirror your phone to your Mac. 

I’ve been testing the new feature for a bit, and it really is what it sounds like. You open up the phone mirroring app, and it presents you to… your iPhone. Rounded corners and everything. You click on the bottom bar to go home and click and drag to go between apps, click with your mouse, and type with your keyboard. The only chrome in the app appears when you hover your mouse up at the top; there’s a button for going home and a button for opening the app switcher. You can’t even resize the window, which is currently way too small on my 4K monitor. It’s just your iPhone. On your Mac. 

I know what you’re thinking, and yes: this would all be better if the Mac had a touchscreen or if it worked with your iPad. Alas. Even in our decidedly lesser reality, I’ve been testing the new feature, and I’ve discovered a surprising number of reasons it’s handy to be able to use my iPhone from my laptop. I’ve fired up phone mirroring to tweak my smart thermostat, which you can only do from the mobile app. I’ve used it repeatedly to AirDrop things between my devices, which I can now do without switching back and forth between them. I can now respond to texts from my work computer without logging in to iMessage on my work computer and control my music and podcasts without constantly digging my phone out of my pocket. I like the Apple Journal app, and now I type in it a lot more from my laptop than on my phone.

I think I’ve used it most for managing notifications, though. When you start mirroring your phone, you also start mirroring its notifications, so everything that buzzes your iPhone also buzzes your Mac. I never realized how often I grab my phone off the desk even while I’m sitting at my computer, and mirroring requires much less context switching. It has also made me acutely aware of just how many buzzes I get — if you use phone mirroring, be prepared to turn off a lot of notifications.

I was able to get phone mirroring working pretty quickly using my iPhone 15 Pro running the iOS 18 beta and my M1-powered Mac Mini running Sequoia. You have to input your passcodes a couple of times, and it’ll only work if you’re logged in to the same Apple account on both devices, but it only took me a couple of minutes to get going. (Some of my colleagues have had a harder time, though, and as always with beta software, you should tread very carefully.) There is one important part of the setup process to mention, though: you decide early on whether you’ll need to enter a password every time you want to access your phone. Unfettered access to a phone is a big deal, obviously, so choose wisely.

You can only mirror your phone when it’s locked — your phone shows a message that it’s being mirrored, and as soon as you unlock it, your Mac will say “iPhone Mirroring has ended due to iPhone use.” If you’re using mirroring on a MacBook, the swiping and scrolling gestures map pretty cleanly to your trackpad. Ditto if you’re on a desktop and using a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse. But I use a Logitech mouse, and that means a lot of stuff is broken. I can’t scroll in a lot of apps, and I can’t swipe left or right anywhere. When I open TikTok, I am stuck on the first video in my feed forever and ever. I hope Apple will support more devices or allow other devices to support mirroring, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Other than the input issues, most apps work like you’d expect. Not all, though. Hit “play” on a Netflix movie and the screen will rotate to full-screen landscape and show you nothing but a black screen. Netflix and other streaming apps clearly see your mirrored phone as an unsanctioned display and just won’t allow it. I’ve also had trouble getting the Phone app to mirror properly, which is odd — sometimes it’ll work, but other times, it just opens a black screen. That might be beta stuff, but I wouldn’t bet on the Netflix thing changing anytime soon.

The biggest thing missing from phone mirroring right now is drag and drop between devices, which would instantly be the best thing about it. Apple says it’s coming later this year, and I hope it’s easy to grab photos, files, and everything else from my phone. I’d also like to be able to copy text or links on my Mac and paste them onto my iPhone, which doesn’t work right now. There are ways notifications could work better, too: when you click an iPhone notification, it’ll always open the relevant iPhone app, even if you have the corresponding app on your Mac. 

I had high hopes for phone mirroring as a remote monitoring setup for my iPhone camera, but while mirroring, you can’t access the iPhone’s camera or microphone at all. You also can’t use phone mirroring and Continuity Camera simultaneously, which is a shame because “I need something on my phone but my phone is currently my webcam” is a thing I encounter all the time and is the main reason I don’t use Continuity Camera.

Apple’s work with Handoff and Continuity has for years felt very cool but always slightly unfinished; this is very much the same. It works well, but there are a couple of obvious things it can’t quite do yet.

We’re still a few months away from macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 launching for real, so there’s time for Apple to add and improve some of the features in phone mirroring. Even in a short time, it has already become a frequent part of my daily Mac routine. I’m using my phone the same amount, but I’m looking at it a lot less. My Mac gets all my notifications now, and whenever I need to do something on my phone, I just fire up the phone mirroring app. It has felt for a while like Apple is trying to smush all its operating systems together to make all your devices feel like one device. Phone mirroring is a simple step in that direction, but it’s a seriously useful one.