bewilder a piece of text , an image , or other re-create material from one machine to another should necessitate exporting it to a cloud or sync avail and then re - import it . Both iOS and macOS have a nifty trick up their arm that I think is n’t as well known as it should be : Universal Clipboard .

It ’s a nearly shroud feature that you ca n’t enable or disable . It ’s just always available . Copy something on one gimmick , and any other Io or Mac computer hardware log into iCloud with the same Apple ID immediately has that useable for pasting .

For Macs running High Sierra or by and by , you may practice Universal Clipboard to copy files between them .

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The copied content persists in brief in the Universal Clipboard . Apple set this only as “ short time , ” which seems to be about two minute . If you paste after that , the local clipboard has been restored .

I find this cross - gadget copy - and - paste peculiarly utile for text codes used for support logins that I have to generate on one gadget and use on another . While some account may use Sm to send the codes , and then iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave can mechanically prefill them , others use a more secure method acting : an app - based code generator . ( I use Authy . )

In that scenario , these are the steps .

Universal Clipboard works among devicesthat meet sure requirements : a equipment operate iOS 10 or after ( that ’s an iPhone 5 or subsequently and a lot of iPad models ) or a Mac running macOS from 2012 or afterward that ’s run 10.12 or later .

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