The message "Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch" Keeps appearing when I try to set up my Watch to unlock my MacBook Pro

I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I just got it to work recently. First, make sure everything is updated to is latest update. Then, make sure Iphone Detetion in the Apple Watch passcode settings on your phone is turned off. Then, try restarting the watch, your phone, and your computer. Then try it out. If it still doesn’t work, unpair and repair your Apple Watch and try again. If that doesn’t work, put your phone to airplane mode, and make sure your watch isn’t on airplane mode. Then try. Also try turning handoff on and off on your Mac and phone. If it still doesn’t work, please let me know.

Logging out then back in of iCloud on my mac fixed it for me.

Here's what worked for me.

Back story: unlocking with my watch was working fine until one day it randomly stopped. I turned off Handoff on my Mac and iPhone, and then back on again, but that didn't make a difference. However, I did notice that the Handoff feature didn't seem to be working anymore (e.g. look at a safari page on iPhone, then on Mac press command + tab -- Safari should appear on the far left with a phone symbol to show you can use Handoff). So even though I had Handoff "on" for my devices, it didn't seem to be working.

Solution (some steps may be redundant):

1. I turned off Handoff on my Mac and iPhone, and for good measure I signed out of FaceTime on iPhone and Messages on Mac (because I read in a another thread it may help).

2. I restarted the Mac and iPhone

3. I switched all the options back on, including Handoff

4. I verified Handoff was definitely working

5. Turned on the "Allow your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac" -- no error message this time

6. Verified Apple Watch unlocks Mac - yay

7. Profit with all that time saved not having to write passwords anymore 🙂

Good luck.

I'm thinking the latest macOS update may have fixed the issue. I just did an update and tried to set up the watch again to unlock the phone and with no problems, it worked.

Triggering Handoff in the Watch app itself seemed to help me:

Watch app > General > Enable Handoff

Fixed the issue by disabling the personal hotspot in Settings -> Personal Hotspot

Got the idea after reading that the watch, iPhone, and Mac has to be on the same network.

unfortunately i did not. i took my macbook pro to the apple store. they tried to figure it out and even did a full restore on my machine. the genius guy tried his hardest and even consulted another 'genius' and that genius said 'i have never been able to get it to work so i stopped trying'. with my issue, i worked before with no problems and then all of a sudden one day it stopped working. i had a series 1 watch and even upgraded to the series 3 after the 1 stopped working.

if anyone has any success please let us know.

I've been in the same boat as everyone else here. No matter what I tried I would always get the "Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch" error. But today, I finally fixed it thanks to a new error message popping up!

For me, it turns out that the issue was my keychain login and user account login passwords NOT matching. They HAVE to match for this feature to work. To fix this, open Spotlight, search for "Keychain Access" open the app. Right click on "login" on the left under the big padlock icon and then select the "Change Password" option and set it as the same password as your user account.

If it tells you the new password you entered isn't secure enough, come up with a more secure one (it gives you a bar to measure level of security) and then go to System Preferences > User Accounts and Groups and change your user account's password to match the one you just entered in Keychain Access.

Try enabling the setting after this.

johannnnn wrote:

**** Apple, I have been troubleshooting this for multiple days after setting up a new iMac. Removing the "ö" from the password solved the problem. Apple is pushing emojis everywhere (even in Xcode this wwdc), but can't even handle international alphabets.

If you would like to send feedback or suggestions to Apple, then you can do so here:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

(You are not talking to Apple here - this is a user-based technical support community).

same. Did you figure it out?

Bingo! This did the trick - thanks for posting

I have systematically been through every single suggestion that I have managed to collect from every website to try and fix the issue. By systematically, I mean I've written down every suggestion to try, applied them one at a time in order to eliminate any conflicts and understand a potential fix.

• The single repeatable thing that fixed this for me, was to change my mac password to the same as my iCloud account password.
• This made the feature work.
• I was then able to change the mac password back to a different value from the iCloud account password and the feature still works.
• Prior to this, I tried logging out of iCloud, toggling handoff, bluetooth, checking wifi connections, ensuring everything is up to date, disabling features on the phone and watch etc but all to no avail.

Hope this helps some poor soul who has had the same issue!

Thanks to all for sharing their troubleshooting. I walked through all the steps you suggested and found the following:

1. WiFi networks can be different for Mac and iPhone
2. Re-enabling handoff had no effect.
3. Resetting Apple Watch had no effect (except to in terms of lost time)
4. What I did find was that the display name shown on my Apple Watch was different than my Apple ID... If you are like me and have been using the Apple mail service since the .Mac days you might also find that your AppleID has a few other (no-longer in service) aliases.

Fix: Sign out of iCloud on your Mac and sign back in using the same iCloud account alias displayed on your Apple Watch. In my case only the domain was different. From .Me to .Mac

This worked for me and hope it helps someone else.

I tried various things including switching handoff on and off , signing out of of iCloud etc. Basically i disconnected my MacBook from wifi and used my 6sPlus to tether to the MacBook and it managed to see the watch ! .

I spent hours trying everything on this page. Nothing worked. This feature worked for last few months since I bought the new mb pro with taskbar. Apparently a recent update ruined feature for me. So disappointing, apple.