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

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.

I AM thrilled. Still don't know why it stopped working and not sure what started it up again, but logging into facetime did it for me.

Sorry it's still not working for you.

WORKING ANSWER!!!

I tried all of these and Nothing worked. With iOS11 and High Sierra running my applewatch did not work anymore. HERE IT IS. Log out and log back into your icloud account on the Mac in question. It kind of makes a mess of stuff, BUT it DID work. My watch now unlocks my Mac.

Yes that's true. Reseting keychain erases it and starts a new one blank.

Regarding keychain entries, as far as I know there isn't a method to export it all and import it afterwards.

Usually Keychain entries are found in:

/Library/Keychains

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Keychains

/System/Library/Keychains

Even if you are to export and import it back, or move folders entirely and move them back over the new keychain, you'd import the problem back too.

Another thing you can do is open KeyChain Access (spotlight it) and export items from there, especially passwords. For certs that would be much more complicated (public keys and you're probably gonna loose the private keys ).

I did reset the keychain. Turned it off in iCloud on the computer before I did it. Basically I shot myself in the head, because not only did it not resolve my "unlock computer with watch" problem, but now all my passwords were gone.

I called Apple Support and they told me that even if I turn off Keychain for the cloud in my iCloud preference pane, it still wipes the keychain in the cloud.

Tried to restore the keychain from my Time Machine backup, but the only way to do that was to restore the entire system.

Naah. Called my ISP for help getting into my email, and I'll just have passwords reset and sent to me. I'll recreate it.

Just a word of caution for anyone thinking of wiping their keychain to get this resolved. Unless there is a right way of doing it that it will work, you could wind up with an even bigger mess.

Makes no sense.

If you had passwords stored in iCloud Keychain, turned off iCloud Keychain (this is required to protect your passwords) before resetting your keychain, then rebooted, entered your password, re-enabled iCloud Keychain, all your passwords would then be restored. This was recommended by Apple engineer and exactly my experience.

Perhaps re-try the process end-to-end?

Good luck.

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.

Yes, they’ll be lost, but only for a moment.

If you had iCloud Keychain enabled, and disabled it before you reset your keychain, then your passwords will remain intact in iCloud Keychain and will be restored when you enter your iCloud password at the end of this process.

Follow this process end-to-end and you’ll be fine.

I didn't have them last night - was working with Support to get them back. Failed, thought I'd try recreating them. This morning I was working with Support to find out why I was having trouble with one of my email addresses and while I was waiting for him to get a senior advisor I looked around and saw that keychain was still turned off in cloud. So I checked the box to at least back up my updated entries.

I checked just a few minutes ago and the entries were all there on my mac. You were right. I have my keychain entries back, but I still can't unlock my Mac with my watch any more (circling back to the topic of the thread).

The advisor I was talking to last night said she could help me with it but I said no, I just want my passwords back. I'm going to give it a few more days, try rebooting the watch and phone and computer then try it again. My problem is, I always get into a lot of trouble whenever I start fooling around with the cloud once I get it set up. 😟

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).

This did the trick for me too with a new watch series.

Which confirms my suspicions as being a keychain issue not a handoff issue.

Way to go MrsSpooky! I did see some suggestions of logging out then back into iMessage and FaceTime and tried doing so - but it didn’t solve my problem. You must be thrilled 😀

Way to go!!!!!! Your rock!!! This finally did it