There’s a good chance that you’ve already seen that viral video making the rounds over the past week, in which a self-described former Apple employee is blown away by picking up a photo from one iOS device and dropping it on the other. If not, check it out below.

PLEASE tell me I am not the only one who didn’t know about this feature 😅😅😅 pic.twitter.com/iBAYEV3JbG

— michael tobin (@initialfocus) March 29, 2022

Yep, that does indeed work as shown, and it’s a very cool feature.

I’m sure there are some readers of this site who will dismiss this as “obvious”, just as there are others who will have been totally unaware of the possibility.

But here’s what I find fascinating about it: this is actually two different features, introduced years apart in different OS releases, working in delightful harmony.

The first is Universal Clipboard, a feature introduced in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra back in 2016 as part of Continuity, a whole set of enhancements to make it easier to move back and forth between Apple devices. With Universal Clipboard, if you’re logged into multiple Apple devices—iPhones, iPads, Macs—using the same iCloud account, anything you copy to the clipboard on one is immediately and invisibly1 transferred to the clipboard of all your other devices.…