When Apple announced Universal Control, their feature that lets you control multiple Apple devices with a single keyboard and trackapd (or mouse), I was quite pleased. For years I had been using Synergy with mixed success. Having this feature built into the operating system would surely make it better. Right?
Below is a list of some of the ways Universal Control fails. For these descriptions Host computer is the one that the keyboard and trackpad are paired to via Bluetooth. Guest computer is the machine being remotely controlled.
Any of the following failure modes can happen multiple times a day. It’s frustrating to continually have to open Settings and reset the control. When it was a third-party app it was somehow easier to take the problems, after all, the third-party didn’t have 100% control. Apple does have 100% control and yet this feature fails constantly.
While working on the Guest computer, the Host will momentarily lose the connection, which moves the insertion point back to the Host. When this happens in the middle of typing something on the Guest, you can end up with extra inputs to whatever gained focus on the Host.
How can it lose the connection when it is actively being used?
Solution: Briefly open the Displays panel in Settings on the Host computer.
Sometimes you can’t get the cursor/pointer to return to the Host; the Guest has captured it. Often times you can no longer see or find the pointer.
Solution: Open the Displays panel in Settings on the Guest computer. Sometimes on the Host computer as well.
From time to time Universal Control just stops working altogether. This is perhaps the most aggravating failure mode, as it usually requires restarting one of the involved computers.
Solution: Usually opening up the Displays panel in Settings on both the Host and the Guest and disabling Universal Control on both, then reactivating it, is enough to get things working again.
Alternate Solution: Restart the Guest computer.
To be fair, I believe this has happened only one time, and it may have been something I did. In any event, I have had the situation where the orientation of the Host and Guest computers gets changed in the Displays panel of Settings. When you got to access the Guest computer you can’t get the pointer to cross over from one screen to the next.
Solution: Open up the Displays panel in Settings, and rearrange the displays.