Mac not unlocking after watchOS 7 update

The only additional steps not mentioned here that I did was to toggle enable handoff on/off on all three: mac, phone and watch, then also toggle on and off bluetooth on all three. And of course rebooted all three. Try that as well as the steps above

Thanks for posting this solution. I followed the 12 steps provided and then restarted my iPhone, Watch, and MacBook. After restart, the first attempt to enable the feature failed as before, but the second attempt worked. I spent about an hour and a half working with Apple Support trying to resolve this with no luck. Thanks again for posting the solution!

I had same problem after updating all operating systems and receiving my series 6, tried "untoggling" and toggling a few settings. Lived with it for a coupe of days, figured there would be an update to fix the problem. I decided to try one more thing......turned phone, watch and mac off, turned back on in that order, went to system preferences on mac and went to privacy tab, checked the box to allow watch to open and voila! It is working as it always did! Sometimes just powering down fixes everything LOL!

its so weird how things work. I tried everything that everyone’s posted above multiple times and nothing worked. I gave up closed my Mac forgot about it. Opened it up about an hour later. Out of curiosity turned it on and it worked like what??

This worked for me. I tried everything until this and it failed immediately the first time I tried these steps and checked the box as indicated it might in stoska992's response but then the second time worked.

After I restarted the MBP, the iPhone and Apple Watch, I was able to get it going. I just had to perform the steps from stoska992 and shut down all three devices and start them up iPhone, MBP and Apple Watch. Then it worked.

I can confirm the 12 steps above worked perfectly for me, even step 12's "the first attempt will fail." After completing 1-11 and enabling auto unlock twice, my watch now unlocks my MacBook Pro again after updating my watch to WatchOs7.

I tried the method outlined by stoska992 but this didn't work for me. As I seen others mention PRAM and SMC resets with no luck I tried booting into safe mode and was successfully able to switch on the unlock with watch option. This stuck upon reboot also. I'm not sure was it some combo of the keychain/plist + safe mode or just the safe mode that got it there in the end.

Tried all the steps here but it still wouldn’t work even after a reboot... noticed the padlock on the bottom left of the setting window was locked so I unlocked it and it activated straightaway when I tried again!

This solution worked for me temporarily and now I am only getting the "Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch" message.

I have restarted my computer, Apple Watch and iPhone multiple times with no luck.

Is anyone else still experiencing problems?

Thanks for this information! Your steps fixed my issue as well (Series 6 Apple Watch).

Have you come across an issue with the Trend data not showing in the "Fitness" app formerly known as "Activity"? If so, do you have a fix for that?

thank you so much for this extremely helpful piece of advice! It worked like a charm! Took a few hits to unlock the Mac but it finally worked!

I actually tried pairing and unpairing earlier on and that didn't help. I actually stumbled across your solution while I was on the phone with Apple Support!

Unfortunately this didn't work for me. I followed all steps (which were all as described), then tried enabling watch unlock multiple times with no luck, then I repeated the process step by step and tried enabling it again multiple times and it still says Mac can't communicate with the watch.

Thank you for this. Worked great in my case. I know that WatchOS7 has been driving me crazy the last several days. It is one of the few times in my history of Apple products that i really would go back to an earlier OS version if I could easily do so. My Series 3 LTE watch crashes at least a few times every day now. Was solid on every version of WatchOS before for the last three years. :(.