Unlock Your Mac With Apple Watch

Wake the Mac, glance at the screen, and you're in — no password, no Touch ID reach. Auto Unlock uses your Apple Watch as proof it's you, and the same pairing lets the watch approve password prompts, including administrator ones, with a double-click. Setup is one toggle, provided the prerequisites line up.

Turn it on

1. Open System Settings → Touch ID & Password (on Macs without Touch ID the pane is called Login Password).
2. Scroll to the Apple Watch section and switch on the toggle next to your watch's name. If you own several watches, each gets its own switch.
3. Wait a few seconds while the devices pair for unlocking; macOS confirms when it's active.

From then on, waking the Mac while wearing your unlocked watch logs you straight in — the watch taps your wrist and shows a small "Unlocked" confirmation. Note the boundary: this works for waking from sleep and the screen saver, not for the first login after a restart, which always demands the password (that's a security requirement, since the disk keys aren't loaded yet).

Approve prompts with a double-click

The quieter half of the feature is Approve with Apple Watch: when an app asks for your password — unlocking a settings pane, viewing a saved password in Safari, authorising an install, even sudo-adjacent admin prompts — your watch buzzes and the prompt says "Double-click to approve". Press the side button twice and the request is authorised without typing. It works anywhere macOS shows the standard authentication dialog and the requesting app supports it, which today is most of them.

The requirements, all of them

When Auto Unlock refuses to switch on, one of these is the reason:

• Mac and watch signed in to the same Apple Account, with two-factor authentication enabled (security-key-only accounts don't qualify).
• The watch has a passcode, is on your wrist and unlocked, and wrist detection is on (Watch app → Passcode).
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on at the Mac — proximity is measured over Bluetooth, and the handshake needs Wi-Fi enabled even if you're on Ethernet.
• A 2013-or-later Mac; approving requests needs watchOS 6+. Any hardware from the last several years is fine.
• The Mac isn't sharing its internet or screen (Internet Sharing conflicts with the Wi-Fi handshake).

When it stops working

Auto Unlock fails soft — you just get the password prompt — so flakiness is easy to live with but worth fixing:

1. Flip the Apple Watch toggle off and back on in Touch ID & Password. This re-pairs the unlock keys and fixes most cases.
2. Restart both devices; then check for pending updates on both — unlock handshakes are version-sensitive.
3. Make sure the watch is actually unlocked on your wrist when the Mac wakes. A watch that's fallen asleep (loose band, wrist detection off) can't vouch for you, and distance matters: across the room may be out of range.
4. If the toggle refuses to enable at all, sign out of iCloud on the Mac and back in — stale account state is the usual culprit.

To turn the feature off, flip the same toggle — nothing else changes, and your password keeps working throughout either way.

Is it safe?

Reasonably, yes. The unlock uses proximity plus an authenticated, encrypted channel between watch and Mac, and the watch only vouches while it's on your wrist — take it off and it locks itself, taking Auto Unlock with it. The realistic caveat is range: Bluetooth reaches through a wall, so someone waking your Mac while you sit in the next room can get in. If you work in shared spaces, weigh that against the convenience, or keep unlock on and simply lock the Mac deliberately (Control+⌘+Q) when you walk away.