Apple’s Universal Control lets you use a single keyboard, mouse, and trackpad between your Mac and iPad. Use the keyboard, mouse, and trackpad of your Mac to control up to two other nearby Macs or iPads, working seamlessly between them.
Sam Byford for The Verge:
You’ve been able to use iPads as wired or wireless external Mac monitors for many years through official or third-party means. With Universal Control, though, you’re still using iPad OS on the iPad’s screen — you just don’t have to take your hands off your Mac’s input devices to get there. It’s multitasking between multiple OSes and devices instead of just multiple apps.
What’s really impressive about Universal Control is that it bridges the gap between the two operating systems, making it more than just a neat way to get around Bluetooth re-pairing. You can drag a file from your iPad right over to your Mac desktop and vice versa. Copy and paste works perfectly. It means that any work I do on one machine can instantly be brought over to the other. You don’t even need to set anything up — just put your iPad next to your Mac, try to move the cursor across the screens, and Universal Control will figure out what you’re trying to do.
Universal Control is already an example of Apple at its best. This isn’t an obvious feature or one that thousands of people will have been crying out for. But it is a feature that’s made possible by the fact that there are a lot of iPads and Macs out there that Apple has full control of the software for and a feature that will make a relatively small number of people very happy through its sheer wizardry.