“macOS Sierra makes it easier for Apple Watch owners to unlock their Macs with a new ‘Auto Unlock’ feature that lets the Apple Watch be used for authentication purposes instead of a traditional password,” Juli Clover reports for MacRumors.
“It’s a feature that’s limited to more recent Macs so it’s not going to work on every machine that can run Sierra, but when it is available, Auto Unlock is a super useful feature that genuinely saves a bit of time,” Clover reports. “It isn’t enabled by default, so there are a few steps to go through to turn Auto Unlock on.”
Clover reports, “Once enabled, Auto Unlock works automatically whenever your authenticated Apple Watch is near your Mac (as in within a few feet). When waking a Mac from sleep and the password entry screen pops up, it will say “Unlocking with Apple Watch…” instead of bringing up the password text box.”
Easy instructions on how to allow your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac here.
MacDailyNews Take: It works, it’s a timesaver, and it’s fun, too!
Worked great for me with the first public beta. Then I paired my watch with my new iPhone 7 and now it doesn’t work anymore…😡
Yeah I’ve tried getting this to work with my gen 1 Watch (OS3) paired with iPhone 7 Plus, and my MacBook Pro (2015) and can’t get it to work. I get a message to turn 2 step authentication OFF and back ON again but that doesn’t solve the issue. I’ve tried several times as well as rebooting, etc but just doesn’t work. Hmmmm….ideas?
This was the first thing I configured after macOS Sierra loaded.
“works with recent macs”…how can that be hasn’t sold any “recent” macs. MacPro is 3 years old will it work with that? Macbook Pro is more than a year and a half old. So if it works on this update how many more do we have till it doesn’t. Come on release the damn Macs.
It works, but not consistently, it’s still a bit buggy for me. It’ll get better over time.
Does that work with Apple Pay also?
How about signing in to iTunes or the App store?
On my late 2015 iMac it didn’t work initially. A restart of my Apple watch solved the problem. Great feature
no luck with unlocking 2015 macbook running fresh sierra install. Unlock w/watch worked during beta1 and not since. Tried re-pair to phone. log in out of iCloud. I think that maybe they don’t want the series 0 watches to work with this feature??
Love it! Works like a charm. It does take awhile to authenticate each Watch to each Mac, but once it does, then it is really smooth.
Series 2 Applewatch, 2015 iMac, 2015 MacBook Pro. Doesn’t work.
Why the heck don’t they do this with the iPhone? I know. They want to give a reason to buy a watch since the reasons they have now are weak if you don’t exercise.