Help · iPhone & iPad

Controlling your Mac

With one Mac paired the app opens straight into its detail screen. With several, My Macs first.

Reading the screen

Connection — is the Mac reachable? Online (heard from within 90 seconds), Recently seen (under ten minutes), Sleeping (the Mac said it was going to sleep), Offline. This is a separate fact from what the Mac is doing, and it is deliberately never merged into one badge.

Mode — what the Mac is doing, with its glyph and colour: Idle (“Nothing is keeping this Mac awake. The screensaver may start.”), Keeping awake, Timer running with a ring, the countdown and “Blocking now, then the Mac sleeps at 15:59”, Agent session (“An agent asked to keep this Mac awake while it works.”) with the task name. Chips name the overlapping reasons — Manual, Timer, Agent.

Someone at the Mac / Nobody at the Mac — whether input was seen in the last two minutes, and otherwise for how long there was none.

Remote session — when remote-access monitoring is on on the Mac: the sessions under way, each with its tool, port and how long, or “No remote sessions”. When macOS keeps the Mac’s connection list from the app, the card says the watched ports can’t be checked right now, so some connections may be missed. With several Macs, the Mac’s card on My Macs carries a chip, and on iPad its row in the sidebar wears a globe. With monitoring off, or on a Mac that does not report it yet, the row is simply not there — never a “no sessions” nobody measured.

Last seen — when the Mac last spoke. Separately, Checked iCloud — when this device last read the Mac’s status and got an answer.

An unreachable Mac shows less. Offline or sleeping, the mode, the reason chips, the agent task, the person row and the remote-session row are removed — not greyed — because a Mac that was power-cut never got to say “I stopped”, and its last word would otherwise be “keeping awake” for hours.

Update required. If the two apps disagree about the wire format, an orange notice says which app to update, and the controls stay off until then. That is not “offline”.

Commands

One more control lives on the Agent card rather than in the grid, because it acts later, through the agents, instead of on the Mac now: Sleep when the agents finish. Switch it on and every running agent session ends with a sleep request however it ends — the agent’s own End, a hook, or the Mac’s session timeout, which then counts from the moment you armed it — so an agent that is stuck on a prompt cannot keep the Mac awake all night. It asks nothing first, because nothing happens until the last agent is done, and the switch takes it back. A row marked with a moon is a session that will sleep the Mac when it ends, whether you armed it or the agent asked for it.

Buttons are disabled while the Mac is offline or sleeping, while the apps are incompatible, or while a command is already pending. A command shows a spinner, then its outcome: “Waiting for the Mac. CloudKit delivery may take longer.” after five seconds; “No confirmation yet. The command may still run until 14:32.” after a minute; then “Command expired; its outcome is unconfirmed.” A sleep or shutdown confirmation means the Mac accepted the power request; its final power state is not independently verified, and the app says so.

How long? Usually a few seconds. The Mac also checks for commands every 30 seconds while awake. Delivery to a sleeping Mac is not guaranteed.

Not a command yet: starting a timer from the phone.

Name

The Name field’s placeholder is the automatic name (hardware name, plus the account name when two accounts share a machine). Type a nickname; it is saved when you finish editing, and it becomes the title of that Mac’s notifications.

Statistics and Activity

Two rows under the commands open the same screen as the Mac’s Stats page, computed on the device from the synced journal. Insights shows the period’s figures — blocked time and its split, sessions, remote sessions, the longest session — a chart that follows the period (sessions on a clock for a day or a week, a calendar for a month, bars for a year or all time) and your typical day. ‹ › step back through earlier days, weeks, months and years. Activity is the journal itself: sessions folded into one row each, a search field and chips for who acted (agent, user, system, tracker); rows this device caused carry its own tag.

Tap a bar, a day or a month to see its figures; tap it again, or Show in Activity, to open the journal narrowed to it. On iPad the two rows become cards on the detail screen itself.

Support

The heart in the toolbar opens the Support sheet. During the beta it says tips are not available on the phone yet.