SIDECAR & OLDER HARDWARE

Get Sidecar working on older Macs and iPads

IT WILL TAKE

YOU WILL LEARN How to get Sidecar working on older Macs and iPads

YOU’LL NEED Mac running macOS 10.15 or later, iPad running iPadOS 13

One of macOS Catalina’s major new features, in conjunction with the latest iPadOS, is Sidecar. The ability to mirror or extend your Mac’s display on to your iPad has several practical applications. Mirroring the desktop provides an extra display that can be useful if, say, your family are trying to gather around your screen; extending it provides additional screen real-estate, including the ability to run one app full-screen on your main display while being able to access another, with a suitable Apple Pencil, from your iPad.

But there’s a caveat: your Mac may be running Catalina and your iPad may be running iPadOS 13, but Apple has arbitrarily decided (for performance reasons) that only newer hardware can make use of Sidecar. If your Mac (or iPad) isn’t listed at bit.ly/ sidecarsupport then you’re scuppered, right?

Wrong. It turns out that older Macs and iPads are only locked out because they’re on a ‘blacklist’. What’s more, this blacklist is stored

in a file on your Mac, and by editing it you can lift the restriction and use Sidecar with older devices running Catalina or iPadOS.

Workaround

There’s one fast and dirty way to try to get Sidecar working with your older Mac. First, you need to make sure your iPad is connected to your Mac via its USB cable, then open Applications > Utilities > Terminal and type the following line carefully:

defaults write com.apple.sidecar.display AllowAllDevices -bool true; defaults write com.apple.sidecar.display hasShownPref -bool true; open /System/Library/ PreferencePanes/Sidecar.prefPane

If you’re lucky, the Sidecar preferences pane will magically open and you’ll be able to start using Sidecar. If, as is more likely than not, you get an error message telling you it’s not available at this time, read on for a more permanent fix.

Apple’s blacklist file simply works by listing all ‘incompatible’ Macs and iPads by their

You can lift the restriction and use Sidecar with older devices

model identifier. Editing this by hand is dangerous, but there’s thankfully a far simpler – and safer – process you can follow courtesy of Ben Zhang’s Free Sidecar app. Before you start, you need to identify your Mac and (if applicable) iPad model identifiers.

Identifying your model

The quickest way to get your Mac’s model ID is to open the menu and select About This Mac followed by System Report… Your Mac’s model identifier is clearly labelled – for example, our late-2013 13-inch MacBook Pro is MacBookPro11,1. See the Genius tip if you need to identify your iPad.