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 tried everything.

Changing Mac password

Disabling/enabing Handoff

Unpair/repair Watch

etc.

None of these helped because my Mac was looking for some outdated token on my Watch.

Finally reached out to Apple support. This worked:

1. System Preferences > iCloud > turn off Keychain

2. Keychain Access > Preferences > Reset My Default Keychains

3. Reboot Mac

4. You'll be asked to enter your iCloud password - enter it, then give iCloud time to sync up.

5. System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Click the lock to make changes (ensure it's UNLOCKED - if it already is, skip this step)

6. Check Allow your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac

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.

Checked my wifi,

Turned off and on handoff on phone and computer,

Rebooted all my devices (watch, phone and computer) several times,

All to no effect.

Logged out of icloud on my computer and then logged back in, now it's working.

Thank you all for your ideas.

I can attest that I tried everything and tried to debug this as best as I could.

From what I've seen I think it's either a Keychain issue or a enrollment validation problem from apple that is beyond my understanding. I'm inclining to think it's the Keychain.

Why do I say about enrollment? Because I had an apple watch series 2 that worked flawlessly with unlocking all my Macs from day 1. Unfortunately I had some problems with it, part of them from my fault, part from the device itself, and got it replaced under warranty. Although when I took the watch to the service, they had me to unpair it from the iPhone and also remove it from my appleid account, after replacing the watch (new device ID) and also after pairing it to my iPhone, I had for a while two watches listed under security preferences at the unlock section. I could not get any of them to unlock my MBP.

So I arrived to this thread and tried EVERY solution here. I even deleted, YES deleted my keychain from my Mac, but to no avail. Today I changed passwords from both my Mac and my Keychain (matching passwords) as some members suggested regarding the ASCII solution. Although my old passwords were ASCII compliant because they had usual letters and numbers and a character equal "=", which is ASCII compliant also, I decided to drop the "=" from my login password and my keychain password and miraculously it worked. Weird! Maybe it has to do with they keychain being synced across the devices and implicitly the MBP password.

Home I have an iMac that has the same old MBP password with the "=" sign in the password. I'll test home if the iMac works and get back later with an update.

Hopefully my insight helps others too.

For me the trick was changing the MacOs login/system password to the same as the one in iCloud. This somehow triggered some sync between the Mac and the iCloud and after that I could activate the Watch to unlock.

Before I also disabled KeyChain in the iCloud and then enabled it again, but only after changing the password I got it to work. I don't think the password has to be the same as the one in the iCloud account, but for me it did the trick.

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!

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.

I did what the above poster suggested and turned off the handoff, then clicked Unlock with Apple Watch, then it worked. I then clicked handoff back on, and it still worked.

I don't think it's a handoff problem or a icloud problem...moreover of a keychain problem. I confirm that resetting the keychain and having the same user pass with the keychain pass in ASCII should clear all bugs. Now my watch unlocks both my work MBP and my home iMac

My problem has been solved.

I wasn't logged into Facetime. Tried to log in then was told I had to log in to cloud again (after my misadventures with the keychain). Logged into both, tried to enable watch to unlock the mac and it just cranked trying to connect.

Then I forgot about it and had to go out for about an hour. Came back and moved my macbook pro from one spot to another, hitting the touch pad in the process. Then I felt a familiar tap on my wrist. it's working now.

Not sure if it was from not being logged into facetime or if there was a problem with my cloud login, but it's now resolved.

Yeah, if you repair your watch with the phone, you might not want to set it up as a new watch, that's where my problem started. I unpaired because the watch battery was draining at a prodigious rate and rebooting it didn't help. 😝

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 tried all of these solutions and the only one that worked for me was resigning into iCloud.

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