Sidecar and My Work Setup
Sidecar and My Work Setup
I haven’t worked in an office in close to a year and a half, and that time has led to some significant changes to my working setup. In the first several months of this time — before the pandemic hit the U.S. — I spent nearly every day working out of coffee shops. This meant my setup had to be entirely portable, and that constraint led to my love affair with Sidecar.
For those who haven’t used it, Sidecar is a feature introduced in macOS Catalina and iPadOS 13. It allows you to use an iPad as a second display for your Mac, and it works in both wired and wireless configurations. Sidecar has an unbelievably smooth implementation compared to using most standard monitors. I’ve tried using external monitors many times before, but I am consistently driven crazy by macOS’s inability to consistently restore the exact state of my windows across the two displays. Plugging and unplugging a monitor is slow, often causes multiple nasty screen flashes, can change the resolution setting of my display, and generally just feels like the opposite of a smooth experience. Sidecar has essentially none of these problems.