Sidecar, Duet, Air or Luna?
Another screen query came from Jem:
“Can I use my iPad as a second screen for my Mac?”
You can indeed, and if you have a recent Mac and iPad there’s a pretty good facility for this already built-in: Sidecar. You’ll need a 2016 or later MacBook or MacBook Pro, a 2017 or later iMac or a 2018 or later MacBook Air or Mac mini. Your iPad needs to be an iPad Pro, an iPad that’s 2018 or later, or an iPad Air from at least 2019. Anything older and it won’t work.
Don’t worry if you don’t have such recent hardware; there are thirdparty solutions that work on older Macs and iPads. Some of the names you’ll see bandied around are Duet, Air Display and Luna Display.
Duet is interesting because it supports both Mac and Windows hosts, and both iOS and Android clients. It needs a cable between the two for standard operation, but there’s an add-on subscription service that allows you to make wireless connections too.
The big boast of Duet Display is zero lag (with the cabled connection), but that wasn’t my experience. I’ve only tried the Mac to iPad combination, and only with a wired connection, but I found there was a noticeable lag when doing things such as scrolling. Apart from that, it worked well, but whether gaming or navigating around an Excel spreadsheet I found the lag annoying.
The second option, Air Display, has been around for ages. I bought into version one and it’s now up to version three. It uses a Mac host, and has client software for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. It works either wirelessly or with a cabled connection.
Again, I’ve only tried the Mac and iPad combination. I used it for a while but found that every time a new version of iOS or macOS came out, the whole thing fell apart. Then when Air Display moved to versions two and three these were chargeable upgrades – I bought them, but again version three coincided with OS updates and things fell apart. I asked for a refund and haven’t used it since.
“With Luna, everything seems much less ‘kludgy’ than with the competitors”