This is Technology Bytes, episode 24, for August 20th, 2023.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy and here we go.
In this episode, I want to talk about Apple and continuity.
Most often when you hear Apple and continuity, the term that comes up is continuity camera because that’s one of the places where Apple uses the two words together with a function.
But there are a lot of other places that Apple uses continuity and I want to share those with you today.
You may wonder why this is of interest to me and I think the idea came from a question a co-worker asked and they’re thinking about getting new computers for whatever the reason is and he asked me why do I use a Mac and why would he consider using a Mac.
My first thought was, you know, the Apple hardware and the Apple software are built to work together and because of that, Apple is able to do things with performance and with operations in their world that others have a more difficult time doing because Apple controls both the hardware and the software.
And I told him that that is true and I think he would enjoy a Mac if it does all the things that he needs it to do and the longevity is also great because they run for a very long time and they don’t get bogged down with cruft and those kind of things and I think it is great.
But I told him the reality of the world is, that I live in anyway, is that I’m an Apple nerd.
I like Apple because how their products integrate together and because of that I don’t find myself thinking about any other ecosystem.
I don’t think I will leave the Apple ecosystem unless they just fail miserably but that got me thinking about what does that look like, what does that world look like and that’s where continuity comes in, in the Apple ecosystem.
All of the functionality that I will be talking about today has a number of requirements.
One is that your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, whatever other devices you may be using, your Mac are all signed in to the same Apple ID.
So they know who is operating that phone, iPad, Mac, watch.
They use that login to make sure that Apple understands in their ecosystem which things can talk to each other because they belong to the same Apple ID.
And they also have to be on a software version, not necessarily the latest but a fairly up-to-date software version on all of the devices so that the continuity can happen seamlessly.
So today I’m just going to go through my list and some will take longer than others and some will happen quite quickly.
So no particular order of these, it’s just the way I wrote it down.
So the first one I want to talk about is AirDrop.
Most often in the Apple world when we talk about AirDrop we talk about sharing information of some kind with other Apple users and that is a big part of AirDrop.
But one of the things in the continuity world is that AirDrop allows you to share things between devices rather than to save it in a file which you can and then get through iCloud or something like that.
You can just as easily AirDrop pictures or any other various kinds of data from your iPhone to your iPad, from your iPhone or your iPad to your Mac and it works seamlessly.
So that is a version of AirDrop in that device world that I find myself in.
The other is AirPlay and you think of that in terms of sharing to an Apple TV and that is true.
So in my system my Apple TV is logged into my Apple ID and so with any of my devices I can share through AirPlay to my other devices and I think just recently in some of the later updates you’re allowed to do that to a Mac from a phone or an iPad.
The other thing is Apple Pay and so while I’m out and about I don’t generally have my iPad.
I’m actually not sure that Apple Pay works with an iPad.
I don’t think it does but I am able to pay with my watch because it knows that my phone is logged into the same Apple ID or I can just pay with my phone.
Those are places where continuity works because all of my devices are talking to one another.
Another feature of continuity is auto unlock.
So you’ll notice that you can unlock your watch with your phone and vice versa.
You can unlock your Mac with your watch.
So those are places where you might have a fingerprint ID that works just as fast, maybe face ID but the reality is that those systems talk to each other.
There have been times where I’ve forgotten to punch in the code on my watch and all of a sudden I get a little beep and it says hey your watch was unlocked with your iPhone.
So those are cool things that you can do.
One of the biggest things is continuity camera and that allows you to use your iPhone as a camera in different instances.
So let’s say you’re on your Mac and you’re in some type of video call and it works across all kinds of different services.
You can use the camera in your iPhone which is often better than the one in your computer or actually always better than the one in your computer.
And it gives you some additional functionality, center stage things that I’ve talked about in the past.
It gives you the blurred background because it has that better depth of field.
Lots of things you can do with continuity camera.
And in the next version of iOS and tvOS and all of those, you can actually do that on your TV and use your iPhone then in the continuity camera mode to take advantage of FaceTime on the big screen of your TV.
Oh something I actually forgot is in continuity camera you can also use that function to use your phone to insert pictures into documents.
So if you are in a pages document you can go to insert and it will say from iPhone and you can either take a picture that you’ve already taken or you can take a brand new picture and it will put it right in the document.
And along with those are two that I haven’t really used but are pretty cool.
One is continuity sketch and one is continuity markup.
So in continuity sketch it’s just kind of like doing a picture with your phone into a document but in this case you can say get it from my iPad and add a sketch so it will bring up a blank canvas where you can then use the Apple Pencil to draw a particular sketch and then put that into the document.
And then you can use continuity markup on an iPad to mark up something that’s already in a document.
So let’s say you put a picture in a pages document and you want to annotate it.
And the easiest way to do that is with the Apple Pencil.
Well you could open that document on an iPad, write on it and then save it and then open it back on your Mac.
Or you could say use my iPad in continuity mode and mark up this picture and it will open on your iPad without leaving your Mac and you can see the live update on your Mac as you’re drawing on your iPad.
Pretty cool functionality when you think of continuity in that sense.
So a few other smaller ones.
One is handoff which basically says I can do whatever I’m doing on my one device and hand it to the other and just continue working.
You can do that with phone calls to the iPad to the Mac from the phone to the iPad and vice versa.
If you are on your Mac and you need to get mobile you can just in continuity make that phone call move to your phone and then you’re on the go.
Fairly simple to do.
Instant hotspots.
So your iPhone always connected to the internet through your cell service can be used as a hotspot to connect a wireless iPad and a Mac to the internet when you are not on a regular network and it’s just there in the list.
It’s automatic because you are logged into those devices with the same Apple ID.
And the reason you can do that is well that’s a hotspot getting connected to the internet but in addition to that you can do it with phone calls.
You can take phone calls on your Mac or take phone calls on your iPad and really the only reason that you can do that there is Wi-Fi calling but one of the major reasons you can do that is because it uses the connection of your phone then to make those phone calls.
And then the same thing happens with kind of a universal text messaging.
So on your Mac, on your iPad, on your phone all of the text messages go to all the same places and you can even do it from your watch.
Reply on your watch, those replies show right up on your iPad, iPhone, Mac, whatever and that’s part of the continuity.
The final two in my list are actually pretty big.
One is universal clipboard, the other is universal control.
I’ve done some coverage on those things before but in the sense of continuity universal clipboard says I can copy something off of a website, off of a document on my iPhone and then I can go to my Mac and paste it wherever I want because it’s been copied to this universal clipboard that really goes through iCloud but it’s because your devices are all on the same Apple ID that that even works.
And so you can do it both directions and you can do things like hey it’s easy to get to my passwords on my phone through my password application and you can just copy that password and then paste it into a Mac or paste it into an iPad or something like that.
And then universal control is the function that allows you to use one mouse and keyboard to control all of your devices and I do that a lot.
On my desk at work instead of buying another monitor to use I actually bought an iMac and so I use the iMac mouse and keyboard to control my MacBook Air, to control my iMac and to control my iPad.
So I in essence have three screens but three computers that do the work independently.
So I can have my MacBook Air crunching on a spreadsheet or something while I’m looking up information on my iMac within the web and they don’t bog each other down.
The CPU, the GPU, all of the power of the MacBook Air is available for that task but I’m also multitasking in the iMac or even on my iPad and it works so great.
Every once in a while it stutters but very very rarely and that is a function that I count on in my life every day.
So I think in that list you get an idea of why I live in the Apple ecosystem.
Everything works together, everything talks to each other, everything looks the same and I am able to get more done more efficiently more effectively because of Apple and what they’ve done with continuity.
You have been listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
