Does Sidecar work?

Ish.

I can get a MacBook Air 2018 to connect to an iPad Pro 11, either via a USB C cable or WiFI. The Mac sees the iPad as a second display, and the two displays can be arranged - I have mine side-by-side for convience. The iPad seems to launch an invisible app called "Sidecar" when the connection is made - it appears in the app switcher as a normal app.

The Sidecar UI is present and almost correct, the control bar can be pinned to either side of the display and a MacBook Pro-style touch bar can be optionally displayed at the bottom. All that seems to work, and the UI accepts touch input via the iPad screen.

However, the Mac part of the screen does not accept touch input. I can move the Mac mouse cursor onto the iPad screen and use the Mac UI that way, but it doesn't seem to accept any touch input - it's just a second screen.

At the moment, Sidecar is working for me, but until I can play around with it a bit more, it seems pointless until apps can be updated to work with the iPad touch-enabled display.

I keep getting the same error using my mid 2105 15 inch MacBook Pro & iPad Air 3 connected via usb.

I've even tried reinstalling both betas in hopes of getting sidecar to work.

It just a bit upseting because I can see others getting it to work and I'm just wondering what I'm doing wrong.

Apparently all those who got it working are using 2016 MacBooks or later :/

I hope it will come to other MacBooks

Same issue here. Tried a 2017 MacBook Air and 2019 iMac. Get the same message. iPad using Gen 6 but that doesn't matter if the preference isn't there.

Works on my 2017 MBP and 2nd gen 12.9 iPad Pro, very nicely too. AirDisplay may have gotten sherlocked with Sidecar.

EDIT: There is a hardware check in Catalina to blacklist this feature on certain Mac models. Seems like the restriction is related to HEVC encoding support (added on Intel 6th gen CPUs), which lines up with the feature working on 2016+ Macs. It is possible to remove a specific Mac model identifier from the blacklist (located in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SidecarCore.framework/SidecarCore) with a hex editor, but SIP must be disabled and the file has to be codesigned after editing. I got it working on my Late 2013 MBP, but the quality is definitely not good- response time is fine, but the image is very blurry when there's any sort of movement on the screen.

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I saw a screenshot on reddit of someone’s chat with Apple Support where they got confirmation that it will work on all Macs that support Catalina. Not sure how much I trust it since Apple Support typically isn’t very knowledgeable about betas, but maybe its only missing on older Macs due to a bug or the feature isn’t fully implemented yet?

i cant think of any hardware requirement that would prevent it from working on earlier Macs. The only thing that comes to mind is Bluetooth 5, but the fact that 2016 MacBook Pros (Bluetooth 4.2) work rules that out.

In other words spend a fortune on a new Macbook Pro even though technology wise and speed wise not that much has changed over the past few years... Just make some blocks in a plist to get onother £2000+ of people... I just forked out £750 for a new iPad Air... What do these people think at apple... People nearly have to budget £3000 a year to keep up... Which what is essentially nonsense... I have a 2014 Haswell 16GB and it cost me £2000 The speed is fine, I checked Intel benchmarks for the latest generation and it doesn't warrant another £2600. Finally apple made one feature that is actually usefull and they restrict it. I hope they make it available for all post 2012 macs soon. You can't tell me that it's impossible while Airplay on Apple TV has been around for ages and works fine. Normally with Beta's the first one is very flacky so hopefully the next update e.g Beta 1 has everything sorted out better. Also it would be nice if apple would document this a bit better it saves people spending half an hour getting it to work exhausting google for an answer.

CPU HEVC encoding wasn't added until Skylake. This feature can currently be enabled on older Macs with a workaround, but the quality is pretty bad.

MBP Late 2017 and third gen ipad ... kind of works

I can see it beta, its lags.

I'm using a 2018 MBP and an iPad 6th Gen. Not an iPad Pro. I cannot get the setting to open in system preferences in my Mac too. Is it only available for iPad Pros?

Sidecar can be enabled on older devices by modifying a default, as noted by Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith on Twitter):

defaults write http://com.apple.sidecar.display allowAllDevices -bool YES

Be aware that you'll probably need to restart your Mac for this change to take effect. Once enabled hover over the green zoom button for a window on your Mac, or click on the AirPlay icon in your menu bar. You should now see a list of destination devices.

Steve also listed the devices for which Sidecar isn't supported (at least in Beta 1). Check out his tweets for that if you're curious.

If you're not sure what your model identifer is, you can find that by running the following in Terminal:

ioreg -l | awk '/product-name/ { split($0, line, "\""); printf("%s\n", line[4]); }'

I was able to use these steps to get Sidecar running wirelessly between a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2013, MacBookPro11,1) and a iPad Pro (12.9-inch, 2018), although it was very buggy. The iPad Pro didn't appear correctly in the list of destinations where a window could be sent. The quality of the video stream was very poor. It disconnected entirely several times. But Apple Pencil support did work for interacting with the macOS windows on the iPad. Overall it was useable, but a poor experience.

Even after changing the default the Sidecar preferences pane did not appear in System Prefrences, and it wasn't clear to me that there was an easy way to see it. But if you really want to try out the feature the steps above should work.

Can you share the SidecarCore document

That worked for me as well, found that in a CNET article (I think). It probably doesn’t work as well as it would on the supported hardware, but I was able to get it to work.

Fred

Note: 2015 MacBook Pro

i guess theres always luna and duet.

hi,

i was today updating my air 2019 with Catalina and my ipad pro 2019 with IOS 13, not hotspot avaliable beteween ipad and air nor sidecar connection between them,.....i am getting crazy with that stuff,...

any idea from you guys?!