As I’ve written before, I’m a bit locked into the Apple universe—well, not locked in the classical sense, but I do have one of their phones as well as a laptop that they produce. And to be fair, these devices are pretty good, and I’m generally very happy with them.
One of the things that makes the devices so good is the deep integration they have1. One of those things that is deeply integrated is iPhone Mirroring.
The iPhone Mirroring icon showed up on my laptop after a software update at some point (to be honest, I don’t fully remember when that was). I first noticed that mirroring was a thing when I read about Apple not offering it in the European Union. Apple claimed this was because of the Digital Markets Act2, but I’m not sure about that.
So I tried it out, because in this case apparently Switzerland is not part of the EU3. And when it works, it’s quite cool.
The setup and initialisation of the connection don’t always work as expected, but when it is connected it’s quite stable. Then you can access apps that only work on a phone from your laptop. Of course, these are then not optimised for the desktop experience, and using a touchscreen phone via mouse is a bit weird, but it mostly works okay.
The only thing that’s missing for me is the ability to properly access apps that are protected by Face ID. Depending on the integration of the apps, it works well, and I’m asked to provide my fingerprint on my keyboard (which works well), but some other apps don’t support that fallback, which then require entering a password or a PIN, at which point I’ll probably just pick up my phone.
So overall brilliant experience, but still a bit of improvement along the way. And maybe an explanation of why Apple “can’t provide it” in the European Union.
That was the same with the Apple Watch. The deep integration was brilliant, and a lot of stuff just worked, but unfortunately the sports tracking features were lacking. ↩︎
Apple often claims they can’t offer something in the EU when they could very well offer that feature. To me this always feels a bit as if they’re upset about having regulation that ensures fair access to digital markets, which hurts their bottom line but more importantly is better for customers. ↩︎
Yes, Switzerland is not part of the EU, but quite often big tech companies don’t understand that or don’t want to, and then we get the same customer-friendly protections as EU citizens, which is quite nice. ↩︎