Apple‘s entire ecosystem certainly helps us a lot every day by offering us different tools so that we can integrate the use of the various equipment we have of the brand. One of the clearest examples we can have in mind is the interaction of our Apple Watch with the Mac, which will allow us to unlock the computer in a relatively simple way.
Sign in instantly on your Mac
When you have your computer idle and you start it you will have to enter your login password again. This can end up being a pain if you frequently lower the screen of your Mac and ‘leave’ a few seconds. That is why if you have an Apple Watch on your wrist you can save this process that can be really annoying. What the Mac basically does is detect that our Apple Watch is close and thus authenticates that we are close and unlocks the computer.
Obviously you must meet some requirements in your equipment to be able to use this function. Specifically, your Apple Watch must be in watchOS 3 or higher, and the Mac in macOS Sierra or higher . Once you have met all these requirements, you must follow the following steps to link the Apple Watch with the computer:
- On the Mac, enter System Preferences.
- In the second line, click on the ‘Security and privacy’ section.
- Look for the option that says ‘Use the Apple Watch to unlock apps and the Mac’ and activate it.
- Enter the password of your Mac to authenticate that it is you who will activate this function.
Once activated, when you turn on your Mac whenever it is at rest it will unlock automatically whenever you have the Apple Watch nearby. This is important to highlight because if the Mac is completely off and you start it, or simply restart it, you should keep in mind that you will have to enter the password as usual.
But not only when we log in to our Mac do we have to enter the password on different occasions such as when installing an external program or when we want to check the passwords of our keychain. In these cases we will have the possibility to authenticate through the smart watch to save us this step.
