William Gallagher for AppleInsider:
Months after Apple first announced that it was dropping Back to My Mac, the service was officially switched off on July 1, 2019.
Introduced back in 2007 as a major part of Mac OS X Leopard, it was a way for users to remotely access their Macs across the internet.
The ability to share the screen of a Mac across the same network remains, and Apple does still offer a way to control Macs over the internet with the Apple Remote Desktop app. However, while Apple recommends that users switch to this administration tool, it costs $80, hasn’t been updated for two years, and is generally unreliable.
MacDailyNews Take: Right on schedule!
AI has a run down of three quick and easy alternatives to Back to My Mac here.
Actually, the ability to natively remote into a Mac has existed since the Dark Days.
It was always interesting to walk into a store with Wintel sales people knocking Macs, find a Mac somewhere in the back corner that was connected to the Internet, then remote into my home Mac. I almost always got the obligatory, “How the hell did you do that?” and “You must have special software loaded onto the Mac that’s not publicly available!”
When I told them that the capability was native in the Mac and explained to them how it was done, they were almost always amazed.
The same could be said for voice and command recognition having been in the Mac since 1993.
Too bad I don’t know of any truly amazing Mac things that are not in Windows 10. So much for innovation on the Mac as of late.
You can still do screen share requests through iMessage. Handy for parental IT support (assuming you can get iMessage running on their side). I have theirs setup to auto start iMessage, if it’s ever buggered up I just tell them to reboot, then I can remote in.
It’s a shame I never witnessed it work. Ever.
This is something that should be available in FaceTime…. but sadly, isn’t.
Back to my Mac was for more than screen sharing. It was a proper VPN function, where a home user could connect to the office network and use QuickBooks server and access the file server and print and everything like if they were in the office. Apple killed the function inside my Airport Extreme 802.11ac last model.