This also means that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have to be enabled on both devices, and both devices need to be within range of each other for copying and pasting to work.

Though both of your devices need to be signed into the same iCloud account to trust each other, your data never appears to touch Apple’s servers-like Handoff, all communication is local.There’s a pause that accompanies the action-nearly unnoticeable for a snippet of text or a link, long enough to prompt a little progress bar popup for larger images or big chunks of text-during which Mac #2 requests the contents of Mac #1’s clipboard, and Mac #1 sends it over. Unlike Handoff, though, there’s no visual indicator on other Macs or iDevices that there’s anything that’s ready to copy.

The Mac then advertises over Bluetooth that it has something in its clipboard, the same as it would do if it had content available via Handoff.

Text or some other item is copied on one Mac.

Keep in mind we’re only working with the first developer preview of macOS Sierra at this point so certain features likes Auto Unlock and Apple Pay for Safari aren’t live yet.Īrs Technica has a detailed overview of the new features and technologies in macOS Sierra including Universal Clipboard and the only way to turn it off:Īfter using the feature to copy and paste text across two Macs, here’s how we think it works: You can read Apple’s macOS Sierra preview for a brief rundown and watch 9to5Mac’s Jeff Benjamin detailed 23 minute hands-on video of all the new features found in macOS 10.12 to get a comprehensive look at what to expect in the new Mac update coming this fall, then read on to see what others are saying about macOS Sierra so far. The concsensus seems to be that macOS 10.12 is a useful release that catches the Mac up with iPhone and iPad features like Apple Pay and Siri, but some of the new iOS 10 features like new iMessage apps in Messages and third-party apps for Siri are noticeably missing. After nine days with the first developer beta preview, more than a dozen publications have published an initial round of previews of macOS Sierra including some new details about Apple’s upcoming Mac software update. Apple announced macOS Sierra as the successor to OS X El Capitan last week at WWDC 2016, introducing new features like Siri for Mac, Apple Pay for Safari, Auto Unlock, Universal Clipboard, and new iCloud features that will ship to customers later this fall.

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