It’s July. That means Public Betas for all of us Apple users, and unlike the last couple of years where I was mildly impressed by new features and unimpressed by certain changes, this year, I found that there is ONE feature that I have started using so regularly that I can’t go back from it — iPhone Mirroring.
WWDC 2024
Let’s rewind the clock. June 2024. It’s dub-dub month, at least in my life, and it’s an event that I have followed almost religiously since 2012, when I got my first MacBook and fell in love with macOS OS X, as it was called back then (I still miss the OS X Mavericks Dock, this new minimal one just doesn’t evoke those same feelings).
This year, all the talk was about Apple Intelligence being deeply integrated within Apple products, the home screen changes, and a couple of other things that didn’t interest me very much.
Throughout the presentation, I oscillated between “Okay, that’s kind of nice” and “Huh?”.
When Craig Federighi showed off the new iPhone Mirroring feature in macOS Sequoia, I was kind of intrigued, but also tepid about its usefulness for me, in particular.
Once the presentation was done, I found myself wondering about Apple Intelligence, about the fact that most of those features are exclusively available only on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, and about the crazy insistence of Apple, that the A16 Bionic wouldn’t be able to support AI features the way the A17 Pro could.
Needless to say, I wasn’t very impressed with the prospects that these shiny new (and potentially buggy) updates held for me.
To Be(ta) or Not to Be(ta)
That is the question, every single year, without fail, that I contemplate after the WWDC keynotes, and usually give in to the desperate desire of staying on the bleeding edge of whatever Apple is offering.
So, as is usual for me, I installed the macOS Developer Beta on my M1 Air the moment it became available, without a care in the world that this M1 Air is the only laptop I have, and if the beta goes sideways for me, I’m fairly screwed.
Fortunately, this year was also the first time in my life that I managed to stop myself from installing the iOS developer beta on my daily driver iPhone with reckless abandon.
Side note: That particular precaution on my part, didn’t hold up once the iOS 18 Public Beta was released earlier this month, and even though all the iOS threads on Reddit and other forums were filled with people talking about how it’s not stable enough yet, I ended up installing it anyway.
The iOS 18 Experience
So far, my iOS 18 beta experience has been great. Barring the occassional hiccup where my wallpaper doesn’t load and I’m staring at a home screen without any image on it, I haven’t faced any major bugs.
Alright, so I got the gimmicky features out of the way first. I adjusted the icon sizes, I tried the various icon-tinting options, and I also randomly placed an app icon in the middle of the home screen, because, finally, I can.
And then I quickly reverted everything back to normal, because I really don’t need this customisation on my phone.
Then I remembered iPhone Mirroring.
macOS Sequoia has been installed on my Mac since day 1 of the beta becoming available, and now, with iOS 18’s Public Beta, I could finally try iPhone Mirroring.
Why is This Weirdly Addictive?
iPhone Mirroring is weirdly very addictive to use. Not only does it offer me the ability of using a physical keyboard, but it also makes it very easy for me to continue using my phone on my Mac screen without having to take it out of my pocket, or picking it up from the desk everytime I get an important (or interesting) notification while I’m in the middle of work.
I know what you’re thinking, this is almost exactly the use case Apple mentioned during their demo, but the fact that it’s such a valid use case for me, is exactly what has led me to pen down this article.
Weirder still, is the fact that I have found myself inadvertently keeping iPhone Mirroring enabled for hours at end, even when I’m not actively using it. It’s helpful when I receive iPhone notifications on the Mac, and I can just command-tab my way to the mirrored iPhone display and do whatever needs to be done about the notification that distracted me.
Mirroring also allows me to continue playing casual games on my Mac without having to keep my iPhone unlocked, and usually this means no one can guess that I’m not actually working. Note to the Editor: this last paragraph was just a joke, I don’t mean I spend hours playing iPhone games on my Mac. I’m definitely, totally engrossed in whatever research and website analysis I’m required to do. Totally.
It even has the basic keyboard shortcuts down, so I can press command+1 to go to the homescreen, command+2 to open the App Switcher, and command+3 to open Spotlight — all things that would normally require gestures, and while you can use the Mac trackpad for all the gestures you need, it’s good to have keyboard shortcuts for the most frequently used gestures/actions on the iPhone.
It’s Missing Features, But It’s Already Got Me Hooked
Sure, iPhone Mirroring doesn’t, so far, have the drag and drop functionality to quickly move photos, screenshots, etc between your Mac and your iPhone — that’s coming “later this year”, but even now, iPhone Mirroring feels very well built-out, and offers enough convenience to make me want to use it, all the time.
That’s something I can’t say for a lot of features offered by a lot of companies that make tech products, and that’s exactly why it’s refreshing to get a feature that hits home; at least for me.
There are Issues, Too
There’s one really random (and crazy) issue I faced with iPhone Mirroring — Snapchat.
I’m not, what one would call, an avid Snapchat user. In fact, the only reason I even have the app installed is because my wife and I started using it when we first started going out, and it’s just a thing that has stuck with us. That, and two other people, are all my Snapchat contacts.
A couple of days ago, I received a notification that one of my Snapchat friends had sent me a snap. Instead of picking up my phone, I decided to just use iPhone Mirroring to check out the snap and respond to it, if required.
So I opened the Snapchat app with iPhone Mirroring, tapped on the new snap, and watched the three or four random clips that had been sent to me. Imagine my surprise then, when Snapchat sent her a notification saying that I had screen recorded the chat.
It was a weird little thing, that I hadn’t foreseen, even though, in hindsight, I understand why Snapchat assumed I was recording the screen. I immediately messaged my friend that the screen recording notification showed up because I’m using iPhone Mirroring, and we both had a big laugh about it — but consider this a PSA if you use Snapchat often; all your friends will believe that you screen record every snap they send you. Which is weird, and a little creepy.
Mirror Mirror on the Mac…
Phone mirroring is nothing new, nor is this the first time I have tried mirroring a smartphone screen to my laptop. However, Apple’s implementation of the feature makes it evident that it has been fairly well thought out.
The missing feature notwithstanding, iPhone Mirroring is already working very well, and it’s got me hooked to using my iPhone apps more on the Mac than on the iPhone itself.
iPhone Mirroring works the way I would have expected it to work, and it does things very well — without lags, without random crashes, and considering this is the state of things in the first Public Beta, I can only assume that it will only get better.
To someone on the other side of the walls of this garden that Apple has built for those of us in the ecosystem, this feature might sound trivial, probably even “late to the party”, but what a party it is.
