Troubleshooting Apple Universal Clipboard Issues

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Like many of you, I rely on Apple’s cross-device clipboard synchronization. Recently, I encountered an issue where copying between my office Mac and iPhone wasn’t working - neither device could directly cloud copy to the other. After some investigation, I finally resolved it. I’m marking it down here, which might help others.

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Symptoms

Copying between my office Mac and iPhone wasn’t working. For example, when copying text on a Mac, the iPhone couldn’t detect it, and vice versa. This was particularly frustrating when I needed to quickly transfer a piece of text from one device to another.

Issue Identification

Since I have several Macs at home, I tested with them as well. For instance, the clipboard sync between my home Mac mini and iPhone worked fine, which indicated that the iPhone was working correctly. Therefore, I could confirm that the issue was explicitly with my office Mac.

Based on this observation, it became clear that when a single device has an issue, it affects both sending and receiving copies.

Attempted Fix Methods

After looking through many tutorials online, here are the practical solutions I found:

  1. For Mac or any other Apple device, ensure Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/Handoff are all enabled.
  2. Verify that all devices are signed in to the same iCloud account. Note that the iCloud account can be different from the AppStore account.

Issue Fixed

In my case, the issue was resolved after trying the above methods. The problem was caused by switching the Mac’s iCloud account at some point, and signing out and back in fixed it.

How Universal Clipboard Works

While solving this, let’s understand why these methods were necessary:

  1. Apple’s Handoff feature itself uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Clipboard synchronization is one application of Handoff.
  2. iCloud handles authentication, ensuring that only your devices can transfer data between each other.

At the end

Apple’s software services aren’t without bugs; when problems arise, we can only analyze and solve them patiently. However, the Apple Universal Clipboard is a powerful feature that, despite occasional issues, is highly recommended for Apple ecosystem users with multiple Apple devices to try out.