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Forgive me, Mr. Tim Apple, for I have sinned
I have been living the life of a fool. If I needed to copy and paste something between my iPhone and Mac, I would either email it to myself or use a cloud-synced note app like Evernote. Today though, everything changed: because I discovered there’s an in-built way to copy and paste between Apple devices.
This morning I needed to move a bit of text from phone to my computer. For some reason, in this specific circumstance, I remembered that back in 2009 I used to have a fancy little clipboard app that allowed me to do this easily. “Did this exist still?” I wondered to myself.
I did what any good online sleuth would in this situation and — here’s the surprising part — searched for it on Google. Take a second to appreciate my skills, please. Please. I need this.
Anyway, it turns out there’s an in-built feature on Apple devices that allows you to copy and paste between them. And I had no idea. None, zero. Shame, friends, is the name of the emotion currently wracking me.
Firstly, you need to make sure a few things are in order. These are that:
Once you’ve done that, you need to enable Handoff. To do so on iOS (or iPadOS) go into Settings. Then select General and head into AirPlay & Handoff. It should look like this:
If you’re wanting to enable cross-device copy and paste on macOS, you need to head into Settings on that machine too. From there, click on General, and put a tick next to the section that mentions Handoff. Specifically, this one:
Once all that’s done, you should be able to copy and paste between your Apple devices to your heart’s content. This works with text, images, and videos — and it’s amazing.
Finding this out has really improved my day. Thanks, world.
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Published February 11, 2021 — 10:12 UTC
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