Unlock Mac with Apple Watch

Hello,

I had the same problem. none of the forums helped.

Then i tried turning Bluetooth off and then back on from my Mac and it worked straight away.

@Doooooop - txs, good to know.

I have also noticed having other Bluetooth devises paired with your Mac will cause problems with the unlock feature. For example, if I pair my Bose speaker, the Mac will try to unlock from my watch then fail and ask for a password 100% of the time. As soon as I un-pair the speaker, it starts unlocking from my watch perfectly.

I was having this same problem, too. After studying some console logs, it appeared that the problem was with my keychain. I discovered my login password and keychain password were different. i changed my keychain password to match my login password and I was able to get my watch to unlock my iMac. Hope this helps.

SOLUTION!!! I kept getting the message saying the MAC couldn't connect to Apple Watch. Tried every single solution I could find..EVERYTHING! Spent an hour with escalated support and we found the solution on accident. It was the iCloud Keychain causing the issue. Here's the solution:

1. Open Finder, click GO and hold OPTION.
2. Click "LIBRARY" and Open the "KEYCHAINS" folder
3. Find the folder with a bunch of numbers and letters as the folder name and drag it to your desktop
4. Next go to System Preferences...and into your iCloud settings. You will see that your keychain is now off. Enable the keychain by checking the box.
5. Once the keychain is enabled...go through the regular methods to set it up: Automatically unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch - Apple Support

I spent hours with Apple iPhone support (including a senior advisor) trying to get my Apple Watch to unlock my late 2014 Mac mini to no avail. I thought that perhaps the Sierra 10.12.2 update might solve the problem, but it did not. When I clicked on the "Allow Apple Watch to unlock your Mac" in the General pane of the Security & Privacy system preferences on the Mac, it said "waiting for approval" and no code appeared on my iPhone 7 or iPad Pro. Cancel button did not work and button that said cannot approve did not work; only closing the preferences window got me out of the "waiting for approval."

Here is what solved my problem: I did not have iCloud Keychain enabled on any of my devices. When I turned iCould Keychain on for all of my devices, unlocking with my watch could then be enabled, and it works!. At last!

Ugh! It only worked for one day! see unlocking mac with Apple Watch stopped working

Did you update to macOS Sierra 10.12.2? This is supposed to fix problems with auto-unlock:

Download macOS Sierra 10.12.2 Combo Update

The macOS Sierra 10.12.2 update improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all users.

This update:

- Improves setup and reliability of Auto Unlock
- Allows addition of a Chinese Trackpad Handwriting button to the Touch Bar Control Strip
- Adds support for taking screenshots of the Touch Bar using the Grab app or Cmd-Shift-6 shortcut
- Fixes an issue that caused the Touch Bar emoji picker to appear on the display
- Resolves graphics issues on MacBook Pro (October 2016) computers
- Fixes an issue where System Integrity Protection was disabled on some MacBook Pro (October 2016) computers
- Improves setup and opt-out experience for iCloud Desktop and Documents
- Fixes an issue with the delivery of Optimized Storage alerts
- Improves audio quality when using Siri and FaceTime with Bluetooth headphones
- Improves the stability of Photos when creating and ordering books
- Fixes an issue where incoming Mail messages did not appear when using a Microsoft Exchange account
- Fixes an issue that prevented installation of Safari Extensions downloaded outside the Safari Extensions Gallery
- Adds support for new installations of Windows 8 and Windows 7 using Boot Camp on supported Macs

For more detailed information about this update, please visit: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT207307

For detailed information about the security content of this update, please visit: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201222

Yes. I did update to 10.12.2. It worked one day, then not the next, then it started working again. Very unreliable.

For me the automatic unlock is working reliably, as long as I am not sitting at a desk with two or more Macs, were both of them are using a different Wi-Fi, because they need to connect to different Time Capsules. Then I can only unlock one of the two Macs.

Since I wrote the previous reply, it started working again for a few days and then has stopped working for almost two weeks.

This did not solve the problem for me. I tried creating a login password with only letters, but that did get the unlocking with the watch working.

This made it work for me! I tried everything else and only by doing this I got this feature to activate!

Thanks!!

Toll, danke, mvdigit! Genau das war es! 🙂🙂🙂

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