When will Universal Control be released?

Even with my leave at Apple Today for several months, there still hasn't been a single word from Apple since their WWDC keynote address in June. It's been months for macOS Monterey betas and iPadOS betas, however Universal Control hasn't been released since then. So, when will it come out?

The talk of the town

After Apple's unveiling of Universal Control after WWDC21, it was the big announcement that everyone was talking about. How it works is very fascinating though. You simply drag your mouse across to your iPad without any setting up or any pairing, and then you can use your iPad or another mac with your existing keyboard and mouse. You can drag and drop images such as images from Procreate to your Mac to add as an overlay in Final Cut Pro.

Why Apple might be taking their sweet time on this

I'm going to be honest, this feature is a lot of work for Apple to do. There are a lot of factors that they have to consider. There are a lot of conclusions you can draw too. Here are my questions and inquiries: How will the Mac/iPad know where the other device is? Is it via bluetooth? What is Apple using so then the experience is seamless? These are some great factors to consider and I'm pretty sure this is where Apple is taking their time to perfect it.

The clock is ticking

Here's where the problem arises. We don't know where Apple is at with their testing. If they are supposedly releasing in this fall, it's odd that they can't even give it to us in a beta format. You might be thinking, this sounds like something I've heard before. Yeah, you might be thinking this might be the AirPower situation. Don't remember? Well let me summarize it for you.

AirPower was a charging pad for to place your Qi wireless charging enabled devices, with a compatible iPhone model. The thing that was special with it is that you can place it anywhere you want. Apple at their September 12th "Let's meet at our place" event said that they were going to release AirPower in Early 2018. They didn't give it to us by 2018. In fact, we had to wait a couple of months until March 2019 when they said that the AirPower project was canceled. How saddening.

Anyways, enough about AirPower. How the heck does this tie in with Universal Control? Well, it's still pretty early, since we're still in Fall. It's only been a couple of months since iPadOS and a little less couple of months on macOS.

If Apple still is on track to launch Universal Control, in the "Fall" it would most likely be in an iPadOS 15.1 RC 2/macOS Monterey 12.1 RC 2 for a final release this month at the earliest. But still, Apple has their ways and rights, as long as they don't leave us hanging, to release it as late as next year. I really hope that doesn't happen, but it's better to have the feature than not to have it.

We'll be seeing when Universal Control will be released, it would be at the earliest, in 1-2 weeks, or at the latest, by the next WWDC.