macOS Tahoe just made hotspotting to your iPhone easier than ever

If you want a Mac with built-in cellular, Apple hopefully has a solution coming soon. In the meantime though, macOS Tahoe has an upgrade that makes connecting to your iPhone via hotspot easier than ever.

Your Mac can now connect to hotspot automatically in macOS Tahoe

Personal hotspot is one of those iPhone and Mac features that, when it works, can feel like magic. But when it doesn’t, it’s all the more frustrating.

Fortunately, Apple has made hotspotting more reliable in recent years. And now with macOS Tahoe, it’s easier to use than ever too.

In previous versions of macOS, when your Mac wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi, you would get a prompt in the top-right corner asking if you’d like to connect to your iPhone via hotspot.

It’s a handy pop-up, but what if you didn’t even need to go through that step?

In macOS Tahoe, hotspot connections can happen automatically, with no user action required.

Above is a screenshot from macOS Tahoe’s Wi-Fi settings.

You can get to the settings menu via the System Settings app or by clicking the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar and opening settings from there.

Newly added to Apple’s latest Mac software version, the ‘Ask to join hotspots’ section now has an ‘Automatic’ option.

It’s not on by default, so as to not cause users’ mobile data to get drained without their knowledge.

But if you’d like your Mac to start automatically connecting to your iPhone via hotspot when no Wi-Fi connection is available, you can change the setting from ‘Ask To Join’ to the new ‘Automatic’ option.

I’m curious to see over time how much more seamless this new setting makes personal hotspot feel.

I use the cellular connection on my iPad Pro every day, and have been eagerly awaiting the first cellular Mac. But if hotspot works reliably enough, this new macOS Tahoe setting could be a great way to tide me over.

Do you plan to use the new Automatic setting for hotspot in macOS Tahoe? Let us know in the comments.

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