It just works. Connect up your iPad to your Mac with a Lightning cable and if you have Duet Display 1.2.0 installed on iOS plus Duet Display 1.5.1.1 on your Mac, then your computer now has a second display. That's it. Duet Display is so simple, so straightforward and so completely without any fuss that we're struggling to have anything to say –– except that you'll come to think this is a standard feature on Macs because it works so seamlessly.
You need to install the app on both your Mac and on any iPad you have, then physically connect the iOS device to the computer via a Lightning cable. We've seen mirroring and remote control apps that show Mac screens on iPads wirelessly but this isn't that. This is physically wiring a new monitor to your Mac, a monitor that just happens to be an iPad.
The software does dig deep into your Mac so it requires a restart but you're taken through each of the very few steps in a rather elegantly minimalist series of dialog boxes. Thereafter, you get a Duet Display menu in your Mac's menubar but you'll quite possibly never use it. When the iPad is plugged in, you tap on the Duet Display app and you're done. It takes the app a short while to load, even on an iPad Pro and there's some business with it automatically finding the right resolution but thereafter, that's it.
There is one thing. Duet Display makes your iPad or iPad Pro into a second monitor and you can drag items, windows, documents, tool pallets over to it but you can't leave them half way. Drag a folder window so that half of it is on your Mac monitor and half on the iPad. When you let go, one side or the other will vanish. So there's more going on here than an ordinary second display being connected but that's good. That's probably what allows you to plug in any iPad you like and Duet Display adapts. You can turn the iPad from landscape to portrait too and while it will take a moment but it will adjust the display size, dimensions and resolution to fit.
We did find one mild oddity in that under certain circumstances, we'd find our Dock moved itself from the main Mac display to the iPad. When it did that, we'd also find that things like the Command-Tab application switcher moved there too. It was distracting but all it really showed us was that the resolution on our iPad Pro is a lot better than on the late 2012 iMac we were testing it with.
We keep saying that this is a second display but if you already have a few monitors connected to your Mac, this still works. It just becomes your third or fifth or whatever display. You can't, though, hang two iPads off your Mac and use Duet Display on the both at the same time.
Duet Display also more useful than a standard second display because you're using an iPad: you can have Duet Display running and then decide to Slide Over or Split Screen into an iOS 9 app. We've been spreading out Photoshop tools onto our iPad Pro and the Sliding Over our notes in OmniOutliner. See the notes, see the tools, but keep our main Mac screen free for the image work we want to focus on. Since you connect by Lightning cable, you're also getting a backup of your iPad to your Mac.
Duet Display is faultless, robust and preposterously easy to use. It lacks only a way to prop up your iPad Pro next to your screen but that's something you'll have to work out for yourself.
Duet Display 1.5.1.1 for Mac requires OS X 10.9 or later and is currently on sale for $10 in the Mac App Store. The companion Duet Display 1.2.0 for iOS requires iOS 7.0 or later and is meant for all iPads (and has been newly upgraded for the iPad Pro, tested here) but not the original iPad 1.
Who is Duet Display for:
If you need some more screen real estate or you want to justify buying that iPad Pro, get this now.
Who is Duet Display 1.2.0 not for:
It's probably too unwieldy to be connecting your iPad Pro to your MacBook so portable users probably don't have much use for it. Though you do spend all that time working in hotels...
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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