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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone Mirroring was the most interesting announcement (and I don't think was leaked).

I suspect it will only be useful for emergencies as latency will be terrible, though.

> as latency will be terrible, though

Based on what? AirPlay mirroring is great today, and this is that with data in the other direction. Current Wifi is perfectly capable of bidirectional voice and video. Adding touch/key events is incremental.

"Terrible" might be an exaggeration, but even in my personal uncongested network the feed can get randomly choppy from wireless AirPlay mirroring.

That might be a sign of excessive congestion on the channel used for Airplay. Esp with device to device direct link, latency should be minimal. If you can, try moving nearby AP’s off the AirPlay channels for your region. For the US: “If possible, avoid using Wi-Fi channels 149 and 153 in rooms where peer-to-peer AirPlay is frequently in use”

Wow, that might be why AirPlay always gave me issues. I’ve been on channel 153 for 5GHz forever. Thanks!

Yeah, I use my AppleTV As a monitor for my laptop all the time via Airplay mirroring and it's fine.

Same, I do this regularly when my wife’s using my desk, the latency is a bit like cloud gaming – it’s there for competitive Counter Strike, it isn’t there for coding or browsing.

Apple would not be releasing iPhone mirroring if the latency were terrible. If they had a low bar for latency, they’d have released iPhone mirroring ten years ago. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines do not specify an exact maximum number of milliseconds for interface latency. However, they emphasize the importance of responsiveness and recommend that any user interface should feel instantaneous and fluid to create a positive user experience. The general goal is to keep latency as low as possible to ensure interactions feel immediate and natural.

I'd like to use it for watching Netflix/Hulu/etc on a plane on a larger screen than my phone without being forced to carry an iPad.

I really wish Apple would just force companies to enable their iPhone/iPad apps on Apple Silicon. But if I could display a video from my phone onto my 15" laptop screen, that would be a nearly as nice.

You can already AirPlay from an iOS device to a Mac– doing this on a plane is a bit trickier because of the networking setup though. I think I have managed to successfully do it once by either 1. doing some sort of tethering/creating a local wifi network on my Mac 2. connecting both devices to the in flight wifi

I use AirPlay to my Mac (and external monitors) even at home since I can watch the 4K feed from apps, which isn't available for some services if you use the web browser (cough HBO cough),

Unfortunately, the DRM might not let you AirPlay Netflix content..

Sidecar/display mirroring from my macbook to my ipad is pretty low latency, so presumably this will be based on a similar technology stack

I hoping my mom can share their phone with their laptop and i can sreenshare into her laptop to troubleshoot her phone.

Also I will use this often to approve okta 2factor requests.

You can already remote control an iPhone through FaceTime I think

You can't control the phone, but you can remotely view its screen and tell the owner what to do.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/109365

Interestingly, you can remotely control a Mac using the Screen Sharing utility (which is a standalone utility, not part of FaceTime).

Oh shit - that's a great point, this will make remote tech support a lot better

This is occasionally quite useful. A few weeks ago, my phone's display went haywire, and the only way I could operate it to secure a backup was through the somewhat hidden mirroring functionality via QuickTime screen recording.

Goodbye having to lift my phone to use crappy enterprise MFA solutions.

This used to exist via QuickTime, but I wasn’t able to get it working recently.

> I suspect it will only be useful for emergencies as latency will be terrible, though.

If they can make the macOS display feature in visionOS usable, I imagine they can make this work too.

I thought you could only do screen recording via QuickTime This mirroring feature actually lets you interact with the phone

I think you’re right about that!

Can't wait to attempt GUI automation on my iPhone using the mac.

The only use case for iPhone Mirroring I can think of is online shopping, when I'm trying to finalize transaction on my Mac, but then realize that I have to login to my banking app to confirm payment, and my iPhone is in another room... I guess you can call that "an emergency".

And of course, there are all those MFA apps which I need for work...

I’m fully expecting this to just be a ported version of the Vision Pro’s feature that allows a Virtual Desktop of your Mac. In that context, it seemed to have extremely low latency.

Why? It's not like remote desktop tech is new or anything.

apple's mac to mac remote desktop is quite good.

Which is actually VNC under the hood.

Not the new one

Wasn't this always possible though? Apple just turned what was once a development feature (Xcode) into a mainstream feature.

With WiFi 6e latency should be ok.

this is needed on Vision Pro

Which, weirdly, should be simple. The Vision Pro’s Mac mirroring is probably the exact same stack as the IPhone to Mac feature.

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