“It’s been a frustrating month, thanks to poor customer service driven by incompetent IT systems”

There’s a really neat feature in the new 12.3 version of macOS Monterey, which has just landed after a lengthy beta period. It’s called Universal Control, and it offers a host of useful features.

The first is the use of one keyboard and trackpad across a number of devices. For example, I have my 12.9in iPad Pro sat to the right of my MacBook Pro: if I slide the mouse pointer over to the right, it automatically moves onto the iPad. I can type there, do anything that I would do with the Magic Keyboard stand, but I don’t need to move my hands from the MacBook itself. If I had a second laptop or iMac to my left, I could move across to that, too. To make this work, the devices only need to be reasonably close to each other, and they simply Autodiscover each other.

The next capability is to take over the screen of my iPad Pro and use it as a second screen from my MacBook. I just go to System Preferences, choose Displays, and click on the dropdown at the bottom left. When I choose the iPad Pro, my MacBook’s macOS desktop is automatically extended to the iPad, using it as a second screen.

Neither of these capabilities is revolutionary – I’ve covered a few software and hardware solutions to make this work in the past – but this is built in, requires no hardware and is free. It all works seamlessly, from the keyboard/trackpad extension tools to the screen takeover.

There’s only one glitch I’ve found, and that’s when running macOS apps over on the iPad. In general it’s fine, but