Q: can’t make phone call on my mac from yosemite from contacts

Thanks a million!!  Works now!

With the help of AppleCare technical phone support, I solved my problem of not being able to make a phone call from the contacts app. It appears that one of the contact cards was bad. We discovered that I could make phone calls by clicking on the phone icon in other contact cards. So we deleted the card with the number that did not work and made a new card with the same information on it. Problem solved!

Great, that really helped,

but I still can't make call for some contacts only !!

Thanks

I have a lot of "greyed out" phone symbols in my Contacts app on my Mac. But going directly into the Facetime App in your Mac will allow you to make an outbound call to any number. Just select Audio, type in the number, then click on the phone icon. You can also type in any of your contacts and it will work from there as well. This is in 10.10.3.

Not sure why I can't just dial out from my Contacts app, though.

Thank you for your reply,

I've tried to sign out and sign in again to FaceTime on both iPhone and Mac, as of that I'm able to call from Contacts App as well as FaceTime App.

OS X 10.10.3

I figured it out as well - user error, hah. In the Contacts App, the blue phone icon will appear next  to the number itself, not under the "call" category where it says FaceTime and Audio. Very confusing!

Hello , make sure you have saved your iphone nunber on face time or under contacts , that should fix the problem

This is like an “offline Status” when it is greyed out, they are either not on facetime, or they do not have internet connection

Same problem here. All incoming and outgoing calls fail when sending and receiving from my new iMac. No solutions so far. Another really cool Mac feature that doesn't work.

I just read a bunch of these posts trying to fix my issues. I was receiving calls on my macbook and being able to make calls from within Safari but not from Contacts app, also on the macbook. Some of my contacts had their icons greyed out and some were blue and clickable. I've since realized that the greyed out ones are for people that have an iPhone or other apple device on the other end. In either case you can hover over the phone number and the blue phone icon appears to the right of it. I should mention that my contacts were synced through gmail. If you are in this situation try creating a new contact and see if you can make an outgoing call using the Contacts app in OS X. If you were able to like me then there is an issue with the old contacts. If you try editing an old contact by erasing a digit from their number and immediately re-adding it, the call should go out fine after that. A bit tedious but solved the issue.

You are right.  I was wondering why some contacts worked and others didn't.  Good going

OS X 10.x, iOS 8.4.1, iPhone 5s, iMac -- the facetime and audio icons ARE greyed out on the iMac -- but if you hover over the phone number a blue icon will pop up on the right of the number -- click that and make a call.

The Apple page I visited says "click or tap" the phone number -- which does absolutely nothing on the iMac/Contacts.  Hover --> phone icon appears --> click phone icon.

I had similar issue, but I found out what needs to be done, at least what worked out for me.

If you have iCloud account and apple id that are different from each other, meaning different email addresses, you will need to make sure that when you sign on to FaceTime on your Mac to use the same apple id that you are using in the iCloud settings on your phone. If you go to settings on your phone and scroll down until you see iCloud you will notice an email address under that, which is the cloud id used on your phone. Go to your Mac and click on FaceTime, once opened, click on the preferences on the drop down menu, and you will see the apple id used to sign on to the face time. Assuming you are already signed on. If it is a different apple id, then sign out and sign back in with the same one on your phone cloud. It will ask you to select your phone number and any other emails to use for phone calls. Once you click "next" it will sign you in.

Second, after you are signed in, click preferences from the drop down menu and make sure that the "iPhone cellular calls" is selected.

To make outgoing phone calls to anyone from your Mac, including land lines, you can use your contacts app or the FaceTime app on your Mac. from the FaceTime app use click on the audio tab to the right above, and then type in the search bar the name of the person in your contact list. You will find a phone symbol next to the name, click on it, not the video symbol, and then pop up small screen will show with different numbers of that contact, if applicable, or just one number. It will say on top of that "FaceTime Audio" or "Call Using iPhone" (depending on whether you stored the contact number as an iPhone or as a mobile or something else). If you click on any of the numbers then you will be using your phone network to make the call, like in a regular phone call, but if you click on FaceTime Audio itself, then you will be using wifi and no phone network minutes will be accounted in that phone call. This is useful to call someone overseas for free. I tried it and it works. Similar to FaceTime with a video except that sometimes the video quality would not work well for overseas calls as broadband might not be available. BTW, this is also extremely helpful and useful for anyone traveling on an airplane and wants to call someone using FaceTime. Basically, you don't have to have cellular network, only wifi through the airplane, and you will be able to call someone using FaceTime audio, or video, from your laptop or your iPhone. Of course the receiving party must have FaceTime with wifi, 4G or LTE.

From your contact app, just go the the contact you want to call, and then hover with the mouse over the phone number and you will see a phone symbol appearing to the right. Slide your mouse over it and click it and you will be making a phone call. FaceTime audio and FaceTime video are clear on the contacts, just click the one you want to use if they have iPhones and you want to reach with that.

StigBull thank you.  The Cisco VPN was causing my issue as well.

Im On Sierra Mac OS 10.12 and finally got it to work.... but only by trying to make a call using Facetime first.

Facetime informed me that I needed to switch the feature ON in my iPhone

Settings > Phone > Calls On Other Devices

Switch "ON" Calls on Other Devices  then

choose the device to "Allow Calls" On

......the Error Message did NOT come up when I tried to make calls from within Contacts..

Im guessing the same fix will work on El Capitant as I think this feature was introduced there.

John Kirkby

The IT Guys

http://www.itguyswa.com