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 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).

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.

I Have tried every other solution available on the web including updating my Mac and watch to the latest software. Restarting the phone, watch and mac in a certain order without success. It was the Keychain that wasn't turned on on my iphone which prevented the appropriate communication between my mac and phone to activate the auto unlock.

Thank you for your advise!!! I was so frustrated about this, I was trying to figure this out the whole night!!! 🙂

If, like me, any of you saw all these posters saying "that worked!" in reference to all manner of crazy idea, only to painstakingly try them all and no, it still didn't work, you might try something I found a different thread where someone did this:

"Log out of FaceTime and Messages on your Mac, and then log back in."

This worked for me. Which I actually find very odd. I also find it odd that there are so many weirdly different solutions.

This leads me to believe that one or two of these other ideas are the actual fix, but that fix is followed by a time delay (communicating with Apple ID or some other data propagation between devices). Since we do not see an immediate result, we try all sorts of other unrelated things, and then suddenly, lo and behold, some totally unrelated action appears to work only because sufficient time passed since we did the thing that ACTUALLY worked.

Anyway, could be wrong, but there are so many different supposed solutions listed across so many threads that I doubt the veracity of many of them - including the one that appears to have worked for me.

Very annoying problem, no matter!

Thank you! This worked for me, I had the original Apple Watch with which unlocking worked fine, but then I switched to a Series 2 and it stopped working. Signing out and back in to iCloud fixed it. Thanks!!

I tried everything mentioned so far but still had the problem. Then I unchecked iCloud Keychain on Mac and I was enable to check unlock with watch and get past the infinite "turning on" which happened previously. Then I could turn back on iCloud Keychain.

It was keychain access for me as well. I had changed from a first generation apple watch to a series 2 and noticed that all of my devices started asking me to sign back in to iCloud (twice on each device). Either the first or second prompt was actually for "keychain access" and after typing my password in whichever prompt was present on the screen, the "keychain access" one had disappeared from off of the screen and I never actually got to sign back in for keychain access. This is what was keeping my MacBook from unlocking; the phone itself didn't have access to the keychain in order to pass the password over to the mac sign-in (which is what really happens when you "unlock with apple watch"). Just took me some time to figure out what had happened.

Thank you so much! I had given up trying to get my Watch to unlock the mac, but today after installing sierra 10.12.4 I wanted to give another try and I discovered your post, and NOW IT WORKS!

I do not know if it was the solution, but in my case what at least helped was to change the password of login keychain and user-id to the same value, even if.. they were already the same!

I changed both to another new password, and now it works!

Don't know if it can help, but that's it!

I had a similar issue, but for me, to resolve the issue, I had to go to my Bluetooth settings on my MacBook and then _pair_ my iPhone to my MacBook. It had become "forgotten" (or otherwise the pairing was lost).

Which thing worked? Handoff off/on or iCloud Keychain off/on?

I didn't even realised handoff is in sys prefs since it isn't in the search but yeh its in general. I'll try that next time it stops working but for me keychain off on worked.

Putting my phone into Airplane mode, and then connecting the watch through settings on the Mac was what finally worked for me. After I connected the watch I took the phone out of Airplane mode and everything was still working as expected.