On Monday, Apple released macOS 12.3 and iOS/iPadOS 15.4. The two biggest features in these updates are Universal Control and mask support for Face ID. I recommend the excellent MacStories summaries of macOS and iOS.

Universal Control The pointer goes where no mouse has gone before: from a Mac (left) to an iPad.Universal Control lets you control different Apple devices—Macs or iPads—without lifting your hand from your keyboard and pointing device. If you’ve got two Macs, or a Mac and an iPad, or two Macs and an iPad, or a Mac and two iPads—look, you get the idea. Universal Control lets you push the pointer off the edge of your screen… and it magically appears on the other device’s screen.

This isn’t Sidecar, which turns an iPad into an external Mac display. When you move the pointer around on an iPad from your Mac, you’re driving the iPad and iPadOS. That’s why it’s best to think of Universal Control as a keyboard-and-pointing-device sharing system, not a display sharing system.

(And yes, there’s more than just display sharing going on—there’s clipboard sharing and the ability to drag-and-drop across devices and other stuff that’s clearly an expansion of the proximity functionality Apple’s been building since the early days of AirDrop.)…