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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

"It just works" is a lie. It does not just work.

It fails all the time for inexplicable reasons. Eg. one computer has two users signed in -- doesn't work, silent failure, no error message.

Computer not yet booted -- does not work, no way to type in the login password. (Granted this is hard to solve, but would be what I need to get away without a KVM switch)

One computer crashes -- your second Mac is now mouseless for 5 minutes until some time out occurs.

Multiple monitors stacked vertically: You can only move the cursor across one of the borders, the other one doesn't work.

Using a 3rd party mouse with extra functions: can't use them or scrolling won't work anymore.

The problem is that when something fails, there is no error message, no log message, no indication what you need to do to make it work.

As with all Apple solutions, it's a seamless experience if it happens to work, but if it doesn't work you'll be pulling your hairs.

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Even the "just works" experience isn't great because it's just not intuitive to setup. There's no confirmation that yes, your iPad and this other machine are connected. It either fails silently, or you realize you can move your cursor over. But where do you move your cursor? You also need to setup Sidecar to tell it where your screens are located. The only way I got it to work was to look through third-party articles. I'd love to see a dropdown list of what machines I'm connected with.

In addition, going from my Mac to an iPad is laggy and it had the caps lock flipped between each machine!

What is really fun though is Synergy, which a few years ago was running a Mac, a Linux box, and an O2 all from the same keyboard and mouse.

> The problem is that when something fails, there is no error message, no log message, no indication what you need to do to make it work.

> As with all Apple solutions, it's a seamless experience if it happens to work, but if it doesn't work you'll be pulling your hairs.

This is probably the thing that annoys me the most about Apple stuff, particularly over the last 5 years or so. I know they're never gonna give us knobs and dials to fiddle with this stuff when it goes wrong, but for christ's sake at least tell me what's wrong, or even that something is wrong. Prodding at the controls on my phone trying to work out why the hell it won't connect to the AirPods that are right there is not a good experience for anyone.

My favourite example is Airdrop. It never ever was reliable for me, hidden problems made it inoperational between changing combination of 3 apple products (2 MacBooks and one iPhone) most of the time. Mostly it does not work. The other device does not appear on the 'radar'. Even when works then one file at a time, choosing 3 options for each single one, e.g. transfer 4 pdf I require on the road for travel, drag only one (4 at the same time is refused), accept teansfer, select where to put it let's say files, then select where in files. repeated 4 times. Not even remotely user friendly or making life easier as it was supposed to. But if you have a picture (e.g. screenshot you have no choice at all, it decides that it WILL go among pictures, that's it! Right now I only can send files from one Mac to iPhone but not the other way around. It was working two ways before until an update on one of the devices, don't remember which one. And remained so even after repeated updates on both (one is an old SE so that may be just behind features or what, but I don't care why! I am not for my f.g phone but the other way around! I paid for it to help me not for solving mysteries! It should just work but it just not!)

Ha, I found the same thing. It’s very buggy right now. But I think there’s still an important grain of truth in the idea that it “just works”. OK it’s buggy, so it doesn’t always work. But when it does, it just works. It’s all or nothing. That’s why people prefer Apple stuff and are willing to overlook bugs. Their competitor’s products come with caveats that go way beyond “it’s got a few bugs we haven’t ironed out yet”.

> But when it does, it just works.

Until it doesn't. A few files in iCloud drive just stopped syncing a handful of times. Is it a network issue? A temporary glitch? Should I restart the computer? Or just wait a little? Nobody knows!

I switched to Syncthing for syncing files. It also fails sometimes. But it shows a clear, actionable error message when it fails (eg: file name contains characters not supported on target device). And there's a button to manually trigger a sync in case the file system observation didn't work.

With iCloud it's always a surprise. Is it going to sync? Probably. When? In the next minute probably. It's been 5 minutes, is there a way to sync right now? Try restarting the computer, maybe that'll fix it.

> Their competitor’s products come with caveats that go way beyond “it’s got a few bugs we haven’t ironed out yet”.

The unspoken truth. Yes, you may get more debug output in other ecosystems but there are going to be mountains of bugs and a kludge of workarounds to get “seamless” integration.

Can this particular problem be solved better now? Yes. Can every other cross device integration be solved as well? No way!

The pain stretches across software and hardware.

I’ve had similar issues, but I believe one of the issues you’re encountering is intentional:

> Multiple monitors stacked vertically: You can only move the cursor across one of the borders, the other one doesn't work.

Once two devices are connected, you can rearrange them in Display preferences just like any other monitors. I found this to work as expected. By default, the connected devices have their monitors aligned such that the corner of one monitor touches the corner of another, but you’re free to change that.

On the other hand, I’ve encountered additional issues. Even with a Magic Mouse or built-in trackpad, there are odd lag spikes.

Scrolling will randomly stop working.

Some first-party iPadOS apps will randomly freeze, including Settings. They’ll stop responding to touch input as well. Other apps will continue to work.

Overall, though, it works well enough that I’ve been using it to run Slack on my iPad while working on my MacBook.

It's not intentional. I know I can rearrange the displays.

Here's my setup (I hope ASCII art works here):

    ┌─────┐ ┌───┐
    │ A1  │ │   │
    ├─────┤ │ B │
    │ A2  │ │   │
    └─────┘ └───┘

Mac A has two monitors stacked vertical: A1 and A2.

Mac B has a portrait monitor.

I can move between A2 and B. I can't move between A1 and B.

That’s intentional. What you’re actually getting is this:

    ┌─────┐
    │ A1  │
    ├─────┤ ┌─┐
    │ A2  │ │B│
    └─────┘ └─┘

It’s the same as if you were to have an actual third monitor. You can reposition B in the Display settings so it looks like this:

    ┌─────┐
    │ A1  │ ┌─┐
    ├─────┤ │B│
    │ A2  │ └─┘
    └─────┘

That arrangement had been working for me, but I have to manually configure it. However, that’s no different from when I plug in a monitor with a mismatched resolution or DPI. It’s even the same as Sidecar.

That being said, it’s been far from reliable, and Universal Control is both very late and very much unfinished. I’ve been experiencing different issues from the ones you mentioned, but they’ve been issues nonetheless.

> That arrangement had been working for me

Well, it has not been working for me. And I've tried rearranging the displays. I'm not stupid. I had a similar setup with a single Mac before, and it worked fine. The layout looks correct in System preferences.

When moving the mouse between A2 and B, the cursor comes out in the right position. I just can't move from B to A1. (A detail I omitted for brevity: I can move the mouse from A1 to B, but then the cursor jumps down as if it was coming from A2.)

It's definitely a bug, it's not intentional.

Yea i have this issue also. The only alternative was to put the ipad to left of the monitor in displays and drag across to get to it. Works but not good. Hopefully apple will fix soon.

> one computer has two users signed in -- doesn't work, silent failure, no error message

Surely that is an extremely rare scenario. Personally, I've never seen it in real life.

I don’t actually care how rare this is, when you have a major feature of your Operating System like Fast User switching which can leave two accounts logged in simultaneously, then it’s inexcusable to not test under these basic scenarios.

This is just more evidence of the systemic issues Apple has with maintaining software. Forgetting to test new features work with Fast User Switching is a failure to maintain the fast user switching feature of your operating system!

Sadly "Fast User switching" seems to be full of bugs in itself (in my experience).

It does seems to be a feature that gets very little testing or quality control. I'm not surprised at all if it causes issues with Universal Control.

I use 2 users constantly on my mac. 1 for personal. 1 for work.

I enjoy the hard separation. separate desktops. seperate windows. seperate instances of apps. seperate download folder. etc etc.

Rare? My wife and me use this all the time on the “living room MacBook” and universal control works without problems.

Try mouse without borders if you’re on windows as well - works without login, across multiple borders, with 3rd party mouse buttons and crashes cause quick disconnect.

... in beta!

Airdrop has been out for years and it still has the same types of issues, so I have no hopes that they are going to fix it.

Edit: I'm not complaining that there are bugs or corner cases. Every software has that. My complaint is mainly that when something goes wrong, there are no error messages, no diagnostic tools, and the documentation is severely lacking. You have to randomly try things. How do you figure out that fast user switching breaks universal control? I just figured that out by accident. Your only hope is googling the issue and hope that someone figured it out and wrote a blog post about it.

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