Do you have a Mac and do you also wear an Apple Watch? Then you can use it to unlock your computer without entering a password. In this article, we’ll show you how it works.
Unlock Mac with Apple Watch
If you regularly walk away from your Mac, it’s best to lock it down to prevent anyone from accessing your data. The disadvantage of this is that you have to enter your password every time you have been away for a while.
Fortunately, this is a lot easier when you also wear an Apple watch. Then you can use automatic unlocking, or ‘Auto Unlock’. You will probably be able to unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch without any problems, but make sure you meet the following requirements:
- A Mac or MacBook from mid-2013 or newer with at least macOS Sierra as the operating system;
- An Apple Watch with watchOS 3 or a newer version;
- At least an iPhone 5 with iOS 10 or later;
- Two-factor authentication is on on your Apple ID;
- And, finally, all your devices must be connected via iCloud.
Unlock Mac with Apple Watch
To set up unlocking with your Apple Watch, simply follow the steps below:
- Start up your Mac and click on the Apple menu at the top left;
- Open System Preferences, go to ‘Security & Privacy’ and choose ‘General’;
- Check the option ‘Allow your Mac to be unlocked by your Apple Watch’. If you have multiple watches, you can enable this per model.
You cannot automatically unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch in all cases. For example, you will always have to enter your password when you restart your Mac or have just turned it on. In some cases the function does not work properly: in that situation you still have to enter your password.
When Auto Unlock does not work
Do you get a message that you need two-factor authentication to set up unlock with your Apple Watch? Then you probably still use an old security method to secure your account. You can solve this by logging in to your Apple ID and disable two-step verification there.
After this you have to enable the ‘new’ version of the authentication method. You do this on your Mac via ‘System Preferences → iCloud → Account Information’. You can then set up two-factor authentication under the ‘Security’ tab. Another cause is that bluetooth is turned off on your Mac, which prevents the devices from connecting.
Also read: Three Ways to Lock Your Mac’s Screen