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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that all devices have to be signed in and connected to same icloud account … makes this not quite as seemless IMO.

For example work based or education based managed apple ID’s cannot use the universal control functionality.

https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-school-manager/service...

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How else would you do it though? Surely you don’t want a random Mac to push its cursor onto your iPad? Same with all the other handoff features. Maybe I’m missing something!

Right now it’s “the ‘seemless’ way or the highway”.

As far as I understand they didn’t bother having alternative linking mechanism, like asking permission to the ipad though some other app or though safari for instance.

If it’s the same as sidecar 2FA is also mandatory for it to work. It makes sense for the proverbial 80%, and leaves a sour taste for the rest.

With Sidecar I was hoping that physically connecting the iPad to the Mac would be enough. Would a physical connection (with perhaps an additional prompt) be a sufficiently secure authorization alternative? Putting my opsec hat on: I suppose someone could (theoretically) use an adapter to tunnel USB/Thunderbolt through a wireless connection to work around the need for a physical connection.

Didn’t think of that, good point!

> How else would you do it though?

There are many ways. The simplest I can think of is a 6 digit numeric code that you have to enter, once from device A to B and then from B to A. The OS can also ask you to authenticate with your fingerprint before linking.

Didn’t think of that, good point!

Take a look at how Logitech's does it with their "Flow" feature on the MX series of devices.

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/options/page/flow-mul...

The same is true of sidecar makes this completely useless for me

I have a personal iPad and MacBook Pro but I code on work's managed iMac

Same. I considered switching iCloud accounts when I switch between work/personal modes but decided that the risk of accidentally leak information between account or losing data was too great.

At least with the Macs I can create a separate OS user account and have that account signed into the other iCloud account. Think iPad OS will support multiple users some day?

Then you may be able to use Airplay to project your display onto that managed Mac.

Is there a reason that you don’t login to iCloud when you are logged into your work iMac? You can control which data is shared between them if you want to keep personal stuff out of the work computer.

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