One of the best things about Apple’s device lineup is how tightly integrated the company’s different device lines are. All of your content is available across each Apple device, and Continuity features allow you to pick up on one device where you left off on another. For example, if you’re halfway done reading an article in Safari on your commute home, you can hand it off to your iPad or Mac with a simple tap.
Of course, the best and most widely used example of the integration between iOS devices and macOS devices can be found in the Messages apps. Conversations on an iPhone or iPad are mirrored on a Mac as long as the user is logged into the same iCloud account on both devices. The same is true of text messages if the option is enabled. It’s a fantastic feature that many Apple users will say they can’t live without, but there’s a new bug that’s forcing them to.
The ability to carry over conversations between devices is indeed one of the best things about iPhones and Macs, but Apple’s latest update to macOS High Sierra has broken this key functionality for a number of users.
In a nutshell, it appears as though users are not receiving notifications when new messages arrive on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch as long as their Mac computers are also on. Making matters even worse, notifications on the Mac are severely delayed, so affected users don’t know when they receive messages even if they’re using their Mac computers.
There are a number of threads about the issue on Apple’s support forum and elsewhere, but this one likely sums it up best. “Receiving messages on my Mac are now extremely delayed since installing High Sierra,” a user wrote. “They will show up on my iPhone, but without a notification so I can’t see or hear it. Then several minutes later it will pop up on the Mac.”
For those impacted by this annoying bug, the only things that seem to get messaging working again on an iPhone, albeit temporarily, are to either disable Messages on the Mac or simply shut down the computer. Neither of those are solutions, of course, but they at least ensure that affected users are notified immediately when new messages arrive on their iPhones.
Lastly, some more bad news: According to AppleInsider, the latest available betas still don’t fix this annoying problem.
