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Petcook Author

Level 1

80 points

Your Apple Watch must be signed in to iCloud to allow it to unlock your Mac.

My macbook pro (OS Sierra) stopped using my apple watch to sign in. I've tried reclicking "Allow your apple watch to unlock your Mac" in the Security and Privacy tab of the Systems Preferences; however, I keep getting a dialog box with this notice, "Your Apple Watch must be signed in to iCloud to allow it to unlock your Mac." My apple watch is signed into iCloud with the same iCloud account on my Mac and everything was working fine a few days ago.

Any suggestions?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013)

Posted on Oct 30, 2016 9:54 AM

Top-ranking reply

Muxa

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Feb 3, 2017 12:15 AM

Unpairing and repairing the watch did not help.

Here's what i've tried:

on Mac open System Preferences > iCould > Account Details > Devices Devices, select Apple Watch and click Remove From Account
restart iPhone
open Apple Watch app on iPhone
open General > Apple ID
I saw my Sign In button below my Apple ID
then i accidentally went back to General and after going to Apple ID again the Sign In button was not longer there!

Come on, Apple, you've got improve the quality control of software that you release!

View in context

57 replies

Dec 18, 2016 9:36 AM in response to Petcook

I'm using public beta Sierra and an update fixed this for me.

Dec 18, 2016 2:39 PM in response to jsw324

have you updated your Mac, iPhone and Apple watch with latest OS updates? This fixed it for me about 10-14 days ago, and it stayed fixed.

Dec 21, 2016 8:18 PM in response to Petcook

This keeps happening to me too, but I am unwilling to keep unpairing and re-pairing my watch, because then I have to re-add all my credit cards to Apple Pay, and that takes a long time and causes banks to send me physical letters, which is a ridiculous length to have to go to in order to keep fixing a broken feature!

It would be wonderful if it worked, but it is so far from that much of the time.

Dec 22, 2016 5:31 AM in response to Petcook

I tried unpairing my Apple Watch and re-pairing it.

Didn't work (this step is time consuming).

Tried signing out of iCloud on my Phone (and thus the watch as well) and signing back in.

Didn't work.

Tried signing out of iCloud on my mac and back in - the stubborn checkbox is now finally checked.

Finally, "It just works".

Jan 9, 2017 9:25 AM in response to Petcook

I have this issue too, and see the "recommended answer" is to unpair and repair - @Apple - this is unacceptable. It keeps happening and I keep having to do this. Can we get a fix for it please?