SIDECAR MACBOOK PRO 2015 MAC

In all cases, I spent at least a little time testing the feature both wired and wirelessly. I tested Sidecar primarily on a 3rd-generation iPad Air and a 6th-generation iPad and a 2016 MacBook Pro, 2018 MacBook Air, and 2017 iMac. Trying to do this without hardware HEVC acceleration would probably be a bad time.

Below is a shot of the macOS GPU History monitor the tall usage peak in the middle is when I quickly swiped between two full-screen apps on my iPad Air 3 connected via Lightning cable, and the smaller peaks on the left and right are when I performed an identical task on the internal display of a 2018 MacBook Air (the Air's display is set to a higher resolution, too-2880×1800, compared to 2224×1668). That means the 5th-generation iPad, which does support HEVC via the Apple A9 chip but doesn't support the Apple Pencil, isn't compatible with Sidecar. The iPad Air 2 and Mini 4 are excluded, too (early Catalina and iPadOS 13 betas did allow Sidecar on those tablets, but support was removed fairly early on).Ī Sidecar display does appear to be a bit harder on your Mac’s GPU than a typical monitor, probably because it has to handle HEVC encoding on top of rendering the stuff on the screen. On the iPad end, Apple tells me that Apple Pencil support is the limiting factor, not HEVC encoding or decoding. Going with H.264 instead would have maximized compatibility, but since HEVC videos are about half as large as H.264 videos of similar quality, HEVC does make more sense if you’re trying to deliver low-latency video over a wireless connection. Intel added HEVC support in the Skylake processor generation, which means Sidecar support is effectively limited to Macs built after late 20: In Macs without a T2, it's handled by Intel's Quick Sync video encoding engine, even on Macs with dedicated GPUs that can do their own HEVC encoding. In Macs with an Apple T2 chip, HEVC encoding and decoding is one of the many things that chip can handle.

If you look at Activity Monitor, the process that seems to be handling the heavy lifting when Sidecar is active is actually 'avconferenced,' the same process used for video streaming when you're using FaceTime.

SIDECAR MACBOOK PRO 2015 MAC

On the Mac end of the connection, Sidecar requires hardware support for HEVC/H.265 video encoding, since Sidecar operates not by sending a typical display signal to your iPad, but by sending a video stream over either Wi-Fi or a connected Lightning or USB-C cable. And while you can use Sidecar as just a plain-old external display (albeit with restrictions, which we’ll cover in a minute), it can also be used to add touch controls, Touch Bar support, and Apple Pencil input to a Mac. Sidecar doesn’t have to be new or innovative to be a good idea, and it’s convenient to have this feature built right into the operating system.

It’s a classic case of Sherlocking Apple’s version might not do all the same things, but it does enough that most people aren’t going to need to pay for Duet Display anymore. Apps like Duet Display have made this sort of thing possible for years, and those apps don’t come with the hardware restrictions that Apple has placed on Sidecar. Sidecar-the new feature that allows newer Macs to use iPads running iPadOS 13 as external displays-isn’t a new idea.

Sidecar macbook pro 2015