Q: Instant Hotspot worked with Yosemite and iPhone 5S.  Doesn't work with Yosemite and iPhone 6 Plus.  Please help.  Tells me it fails to enable personal hotspot.

Reference the "Instant Hotspot" section of the HT6337 article attached to your query above.

• Have you set up and turned on your personal hotspot on your iPhone 6+?
• When you go to the WiFi menulet at the top of your Mac, have you selected the iPhone's hotspot as shown in the illustration in the article?

The article also states:

"You'll need to sign in to iCloud (on your Mac) using the same Apple ID as your iPhone."

Have you done that?

I too am having the same problem with my 2012 Mac Mini. BT is on, WiFi is on. It sees the iPhone 6 Plus. But upon to trying to connect, I receive the same error.

However, I've put my iPhone 5 into Airplane mode and turned WiFi and BlueTooth back on (to make sure I wasn't on cellular). It saw my iPhone 6 Plus right away. I click on it on the 5 to connect to the 6 Plus. On the 6 Plus with Settings---> Personal Hotspot window open. The Personal Hotspot tick went from OFF to ON when the 5 connected to it. And in the top of both iPhones are the two "links" to indicate that they are connected.

Now it's working... Normally when I make posts like this. I tend to check stuff over with a fine tooth comb. The ONLY thing that I could say that might of made it work. Was the fact that I manually turned on the Personal Hotspot at some point. Then turned it back off. Allowed either the 5 or Mac Mini to connect to it. Now both the Mac Mini and iPhone 5 are connected to the 6 Plus via Personal Hotspot. Simply by selecting the iPhone 6 Plus in the WiFi menu. I tried doing a Power slide reset to see if that caused the malfunction. But it continued to work afterwards.

Good luck with your problem. I only wish I knew what I did besides the manually turning on Personal Hotspot at one point.

KOT

Having similar issues.  New iPhone 6 with AT&T.  I enable Personal hotspot on the iPhone 6, and can immediately connect to it with an iPad2.  My 2014 MBA however, takes many, many attempts before I can get it to connect to the iPhone 6 PHS.  I've tried turning on/off PHS, turning on/off LTE for data/voice, turning on off.  WHAT SEEMS TO HAVE FIXED THIS PROBLEM: sign out of icloud on my iphone, then sign in again.  Now Personal hotspot connects instantly on my MBA.

SOLUTION:  iCloud, iCloud, iCloud

Hello.  I'd been feeling you all's pain for the last 6 weeks at least! .. And then, last night, I decided to go Rambo-style at the problem and, in short, the solution for me can be summed up in a few words:  iCloud settings on both devices must fully coincide at nothing less than PERFECTION--up to and including, KEYCHAIN. 

Note:  Keep in mind that, based on everything I've read, the "instant" in instant hotspot is only possible because your iCloud account is what's used for authentication.

I followed the usual steps referenced on numerous boards online first (i.e., reset network settings on iPhone 6 Plus, signed out of iCloud on both my MBP Late 2014 and iPhone 6 Plus, etc.) but this WAS NOT ENOUGH.  I then reset my Keychain too:  Resetting your keychain in Mac OS X - Apple Support ... Then and only then did I start the sign-on process on both devices and made absolutely sure to match iCloud settings at 100% on both.  For me, resetting Keychain at a full 100% in addition to the signing out of iCloud on both devices and resetting network settings on the phone seems to have done the trick.

In short, based on my experience, YES, this does appear to be a SETTINGS problem .. but not with the devices but with what is CLEARLY Apple's weakest step-child:  iCloud.  My recommendation if you are particularly impatient:  Create and use and entirely new iCloud username entirely, squeaky clean keychain, and match iCloud settings on both devices at 100%.

Hope this works for you all!

JRdC

I have this problem since the beginning so I thought that continuity is just a junk.... It just doesn't work. With resetting the key-chain, does it remove all my passwords even the one produced by keychain?

Here are my symptoms:

- Messages works fine, I can read and sms from my mac and iphone

- Calls: When there's an incoming call, it would appear on my mac, but when I try to answer, it will fail. iPad mini has no problem in answering the calls from iPhone 6 plus. To make a call from mac, it failed as well

- Handoff: sometimes working and some other time it just doesn't show it. But I have seen this working many times

- iPhone Hotspot: Like to poster, i have never get this work. I would have to do it manually by opting 'Join Other Network' then 'Show network...' then try to look for my iPhone 6 plus. If I chose from the main wifi screen which shows my personal hotspot, I can click on it and it will try to connect but the result will be fail.

So... the question is will keychain reset fix all of those issues? Do I have to manually write down all my passwords first before resetting the keychain? And after all problems fixed, can I use key chain at all?

Reset the Keychain.... I forgot some password... :sigh:... then the problem doesn't change

I had the same issue.  Instant hotspot wasn't working from my 6Plus to my mac.  Normal hotspot was working, but fishing my phone out of my pocket on the train makes me sad.

I checked a bunch of the the things mentioned in other posts with no luck.  Turned out the problem was that I had to tell my mac to forget the hotspot with the wifi password set.  After that it worked fine again!

On your mac, go to System Preferences --> Network --> Wifi --> Advanced and remove your phone from the list.  Then try the instant hotspot again.

I get this error too. You can look at the logs in console.  It's all from a process called sharingd:

6/25/15 6:16:40.789 AM sharingd[274]: 06:16:40.788 : Tethering: Request failed (id = 53F9857A-A9B4-4879-9D07-838803AE1D03, duplicates = YES, error = Error Domain=com.apple.identityservices.error Code=16 "Message send failed" UserInfo=0x7f93b14228a0 {NSLocalizedDescription=Message send failed,

NSUnderlyingError=0x7f93b16a9c50 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (com.apple.ids.idssenderrordomain error 2.)"})

6/25/15 6:16:50.290 AM sharingd[274]: 06:16:50.290 : SDHotspotBrowser::retrieveTimerFired: Called handler with timeout error (identifier = 7BEBEB80-444A-47F8-8C8D-391E1E8E62C4)

It just doesn't work for me anymore.  Each "solution" seems to be similar to like kicking the tv.  Something happens, but it's just buggy software that needs to be fixed.

The solution is to remove the apostrophe from the name of your iPhone. Try it.

Working now! Yay!

Either removing the " ' " from my iPhone's name or going to System Preferences -> iCloud -> Account Details -> Contacts on my Mac and removing secondary email address did it.