Mac mini M1 with an ipad 8th gen iOS 15.5 plugged into the USBC lightning cable thingy.
I am unable to access network once I disable wifi on the ipad. How do I see if the ipad is not doing all the good usb/lightning networking things? It's a bit perplexing seeing 2 usb ipads here so I turned them both on. Is that expected?
iPad, iOS 9
While iPad can connect to a PC or Mac computer for file transfer - and the iPad can share its own Cellular hotspot with a connected computer, Apple documentation does not suggest that the iPad is able to access a USB-bridged network connection shared by a host computer.
If your iPad needs a wired network connection, there are many third-party Lightning to Ethernet or USB/USB-C to Ethernet network adapters that are compatible with iPad.
Be assured that, on the proviso that the USB hub is stated as being compatible with iPad, the Ethernet connection will work as advertised.
If your iPad has a Lightning port - instead of USB-C - the example Anker Hub is not designed for your model of iPad and won’t work with it. Instead you will require a Lightning to Ethernet Adapter. Of those available, Belkin have a Lightning to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter - marketed by Apple:
As outlined in my previous reply, Apple documentation does not list this connection scenario - but does outline just about every other possibility.
Logic would suggest that a shared network connection over USB should be possible/supported by iPad - as this is the very mechanism employed when sharing an iPhone hotspot with iPad over a wired connection. If your computer is capable of offering a bridged network connection over USB - if this works with other client computers, it should also work with iPad. However, at this precise moment in time, I don’t have access to an appropriate combination of equipment to test your explicit connection scenario.
Regardless, if you need a wired network connection, you would be best advised to use an appropriate ethernet adapter with your iPad; ethernet support is built-in to all recent versions of iOS/iPadOS - and is much simpler to configure.
So I have tried an iphone 6SX, and another older ipad, none of them USB tether.
I rebooted the mac-mini, and even tried individually only choosing one of the two "iPad USB" boxes only at a time.
I also tried all the (USBA and USBC) ports, the youtube app and safari are just adamant there is no network connection.
I even tried a different USB cable, but the cable is not fault as the USB cable(s) works fine with XCode 13.4
Beginning to suspect that the only way to share is over a wifi hotspot or bluetooth, which I specifically do not want to be doing. I'm pretty sure this used to work in the past on an older mac machine. I'm beginning to suspect that USB sharing only works on ipad pro which is not using lightning?
Assuming that your iPad is a WiFi+Cellular model, with an active Cellular service plan - you are presumably attempting to share the iPad Cellular hotspot with your Mac computer over a USB connection.
To do so, you must enable hotspot sharing on the iPad - in exactly the same manner as you would with an iPhone:
Settings > Personal Hotspot > Allow Others to Join - set to ON
When enabled, your computer should detect an available USB network connection.
Nope. My mac-mini is wired to the Internet, it's the source of my internet. I'm sharing the mac's connection with the i-device as per the screenshot, over USB, not over wifi, that's why as in the screenshot I choose "Ethernet", which is my "en0" adapter in an ifconfig dump.
Basically I'm trying to get a ipad to connect to a cat5 LAN if you like, maybe I should have described it that way. (And no I'm not wanting to use a picture transfer adapter and an Ethernet dongle, because Apple do not support either device anymore so they are not a solution here because they don't support device charging properly either.)
So. Curiously a colleague who has an ipad Pro can get it to "tether" off of their macbook. Is there something special, Another colleague has an iphone XR and it works for them, while my iphone XR does not.
OK. So was just missled into thinking that since it worked on the device a colleague had, that it would work on other devices. Basically this means it's not generally possible. And that aside from some specific devices like the pro (Is it running a different ipad O/S baseband) where it's just fortune that it works, it's just not possible by design. I'm reading the apple marketing blurbs, and by omission it feels like it's not a feature.
I had a problem with the lightning/picture transfer device and using a range of third party ethernet devices, it worked fine on small iphones only. But Apple no longer "provide support" for the device, and newer and bigger devices like the big ipads refuse to charge at all via the picture transfer device, and I'm wanting to kinda rig it permanently to the LAN and not have to swap cables just to charge the i-device all of the time. There was a thread about this on a stack overflow about a year ago I think.
It looks like my only option is to go wifi and deal with the reliability issues of crowded offices and then write some kind of TCP tunnel/forwarding service to solve my ultimate underlying problem that the wifi being a separate public LAN causes for me. (I'm not allowed to run a permanent hotspot is the reason I want to USB tether.)
I’m not sure that I follow your difficultly…
There is nothing stopping you from connecting your iPad (with USB-C port) to a USB hub - many of which incorporate a built-in Ethernet port amongst its complement of ports. For those hubs that lack a built-in Ethernet port, you can connect a USB to Ethernet Adapter to a hub USB port.
Here is a perfect example from Anker:
https://www.anker.com/uk/products/a8365?variant=41462998597796
The USB-C hub includes multiple ports, including both Ethernet and USB PD (Power Delivery) for connection of your Power Adapter.
OK. I'll buy one of those and see. Will this work with a non USBC apple device, like 8th gen ipad or iphone 13?
Nothing in the apple literature indicates that this would work, so it's worth trying. I looked at similar devices briefly a few months ago, but was not seeing anything that indicated that it would work. What stumps me is that more people are not talking about this as an option, I need something that works with a variety of apple tablets, and with their phones.
Ooops. Back to my abandoned attempt months ago , that device is in the apple store and I raised a support ticket with apple that it was in their store but was no longer available. It's #unobtainium. I need this to be useable for devices other than just the ipad pro (once it looses the USBC port in a future generation it's also not going to work I guess.)
I was hoping that I could build a wired solution, but the trouble is that the apple network stack on device seems to only allow XCode 13 to connect to the phone over wifi not over the picture-adapter or the USB hubs on the ipad pro anyway. I had lost sight of the fact that we are wanting XCode to still connect, and XCode only wants to provide joy over wifi, since it uses the USB link to exchange secure keys in a one-off pairing configuration. And it now looks like using a hotspot on the mac machine is the ticket after all. I had just hoped to stay away from having to secure wifi networks nor deal with flakey wifi, but XCode or the iphone stack is network-sensitive unless I can convince it not to be.
At least I'm learning a bit about how to deploy IOS solutions, and at least things are consistent, the equivalent Android flavored setup is going to be fun.
It’s the older models of iPad, with a Lightning port, that are being progressively replaced by models with a USB-C port. USB-C is the future - not the past.
As I hope is obvious, you cannot use a USB-C hub with an older model iPad that has Lightning port. If looking to replace your iPad, the only current model with a lightning port is the entry-level iPad9. With the sole exception of the iPad9, all curent models (iPad Air5, mini6 and iPad Pro) have a USB-C port.
Insofar as the Belkin Ethernet adapter (with Lightning connector) is concerned, perhaps look further afield than Apple. A quick google search shows this adapter to be available in many countries from third-party retailers.
I think the fact that XCode does not connect, that kind of breaks the entire "application". I had hoped that Xcode "network- connection" would just work over the same tunnel, but it does not, I should have checked earlier. So even if I had the freedom to only buy new ipads it's a non-starter. And now I'm just fighting with a wifi hotspot that is getting flooded out as the connection is giving me pain. The phone is right next to the MacMini but cannot connect. That's a separate issue though for another thread.
Hope the next person can learn from this thread what does and does not work in the ecosystem. I also did not know that the USBC was going to be all new devices. As an Android user it made my life easier as I could keep my cables separate more easily :-)
Share my network connection over USB to ipad
