macOS 27 adds resizable iPhone Mirroring windows on Mac

iPhone Mirroring shows your iPhone’s screen in a window on your Mac and lets you control it with your keyboard, mouse or trackpad while the phone stays locked on your desk or in your bag. Apple has kept adding to it, from a shared clipboard to a working app switcher.

macOS 27 Golden Gate and iOS 27 came out in mid-September. You need both on your devices to use the new features. Apple also gave the iPhone Mirroring app a new icon, as it did for many of its built-in apps.

In macOS 27 you can resize the iPhone Mirroring window by dragging its edges, much like any other Mac window. Instead of being locked to the iPhone’s tall, narrow shape, the window now supports several aspect ratios. Depending on the shape you choose, an app shows either an adjusted iPhone layout or the iPad version of its design, if it has one.

There is a catch. Free resizing only works with apps built for iOS 27. Right now that mostly means Apple’s own apps. Third-party apps will join as developers ship iOS 27 updates, which should speed up over the rest of the year. Until an app is updated, you are back to the three classic sizes.

In practice, this is most useful on a big monitor. A tall, phone-shaped window wastes space on a wide screen, while a wider window lets you read a long article, scan a spreadsheet or type a reply with far less scrolling.

Many observers linked this change to the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable phone, which has a wider screen. Apps that adapt to the Duo’s shape should also adapt nicely to a stretched mirroring window.

The other two upgrades are smaller but just as handy.

• Control Center: before macOS 27, you could not reach your iPhone’s Control Center through mirroring at all. Now you press Command-4, or open the View menu in the Mac’s menu bar, to bring it up. That makes it easy to switch on Do Not Disturb, check the battery or change a setting on the phone without touching it.
• DRM video: DRM stands for digital rights management, the copy protection streaming services and movie stores use. In the previous version, macOS Tahoe, any protected video showed only a black screen in the mirrored window. In macOS 27 it plays. That means you can, for example, watch something in the Netflix iPhone app on your Mac, which still has no Netflix app of its own.

For anyone who works on a Mac all day, iPhone Mirroring is now close to complete. You can give a mirrored app more room when you need to read or type, glance at phone settings, and watch videos without reaching for your phone. Copying and pasting between the two devices is also faster in the new versions.

A few rough edges remain. You still cannot open the iPhone’s Notification Center through mirroring, though iPhone notifications already appear on the Mac. And banking apps behave unevenly: some let you approve a Face ID check with Touch ID on the Mac, while others make you type a PIN.

The biggest limit is where you live. iPhone Mirroring still does not work in the European Union. Apple has avoided launching it there because of EU competition rules, apparently worried it would have to open the same kind of remote access to other companies, which it says would be a security risk. Whether the feature works depends on the country of your App Store account, not where you happen to be. Readers in the US, UK and Canada can use it.

Expect resizing support to spread app by app as developers release iOS 27 updates, so keep your apps updated. Apple is also testing macOS Golden Gate 27.2, which adds Siri AI in new languages and new brightness and volume sliders. A release candidate went to developers this week, and the update is expected around the end of October.

To get the new mirroring features now, open System Settings on your Mac and choose General, then Software Update. On your iPhone, go to Settings, then General, then Software Update.