The idea

The pitch is simple. Keep a Mac mini or Mac Studio at home (or at the office, or honestly just shoved on a shelf somewhere). Install Mirage Host on it. Then use your iPad as the screen.

Mirage streams your Mac's display to your iPad over the local network. You see your actual macOS desktop, run your actual apps, and interact with everything through touch, keyboard, trackpad, or Apple Pencil. It's not a remote desktop in the "laggy VNC viewer" sense. It's low-latency video streaming with input forwarding, so it looks and feels like macOS is running on the iPad itself.

The result is that your iPad handles the portability and your Mac handles the compute. Two devices you probably already own, doing what each one is best at.

What the setup looks like

A Mac mini sits on a desk plugged into power and ethernet. It doesn't need a monitor, keyboard, or mouse attached. It boots up, Mirage Host launches automatically, and it waits for a connection.

At home, Mirage finds the Mac on the local network and connects in under a second. Away from home, Tailscale or OpenVPN keeps the Mac reachable. Either way, open Mirage on the iPad, tap the Mac's name, and you're looking at your desktop.

There's no file syncing to think about. No "did I save that to iCloud or leave it on the other machine" problem. Everything lives on the Mac. The iPad is just how I see it and touch it.

Every Mac app, on your iPad

Xcode, Final Cut Pro, full Safari or Chrome with extensions, Docker, Terminal, Homebrew. Anything that runs on macOS works through Mirage because it is macOS. You're not using an iPad port or a web wrapper. You're looking at the real application running on your Mac, streamed to your iPad's screen.

Mirage also supports window streaming, which means you can pick a specific app window to display on your iPad instead of mirroring the whole desktop. So if you're working in Logic Pro, you can have just that window filling your iPad's display. Or stream a few windows and switch between them. It keeps things focused, especially on the iPad's smaller screen.

Apple Pencil support

This is the part that no laptop can replicate.

Mirage forwards full Apple Pencil data to your Mac: pressure, tilt, and orientation. Mac apps that support tablet input pick this up automatically. Photoshop reads your brush pressure. Illustrator responds to pen tilt for calligraphy brushes. Affinity Designer, Pixelmator Pro, AutoCAD — they all work the same way a Wacom tablet would, except the tablet is also your display.

Sketch in Illustrator at a coffee shop. Mark up PDFs in Preview on the couch. The iPad is simultaneously the screen, the drawing surface, and the input device. And since you already own the Pencil, there's no extra hardware to buy.

ProMotion and wide color

iPad Pro's 120Hz ProMotion display makes a real difference here. Scrolling through a long Xcode file, dragging windows around, scrubbing a timeline in Final Cut — it all runs at 120fps, which makes the remote session feel local.

With Mirage Pro, you also get 10-bit Display P3 wide color. If you're doing photo editing in Lightroom or color grading in DaVinci Resolve, the colors on your iPad accurately match what your Mac is rendering. That matters a lot if you've ever tried to do color work on a display you can't trust.

Working away from home

This is where the setup goes from convenient to genuinely useful.

Install Tailscale on your Mac and your iPad. It takes about five minutes. Once both devices are signed in, your Mac is reachable from any network: hotel Wi-Fi, airport lounge, tethered to your phone on a train. Tailscale creates a private network between your devices. OpenVPN works too if you prefer to self-host.

This works well enough for writing code, editing documents, and general browsing from anywhere. Heavier tasks like scrubbing video timelines depend more on your connection quality, but for everyday work it's solid.

The weight difference

An iPad Air weighs 462 grams. A 14-inch MacBook Pro weighs 1,550 grams. Add a keyboard case and Apple Pencil to the iPad and you're still under 800 grams total, which is about half the weight of the MacBook alone. Over a week of commuting or a long trip, you notice.

The travel kit

iPad. Keyboard case. Apple Pencil. That's it.

No charger brick since the iPad charges with the same USB-C cable as your phone and lasts all day. No dongles. No bulky laptop sleeve. Your Mac mini stays safe at home doing the heavy lifting while you carry a thin slab of glass that weighs less than a hardcover book. When you land somewhere new, you pull out the iPad, connect to Mirage, and your Mac desktop is right there. Every file, every open project, every browser tab, exactly where you left it. Nothing to sync or transfer.

What about Sidecar?

Sidecar requires both devices to be in the same room and signed into the same iCloud account. Mirage works from anywhere, over any network. For the full breakdown, see Mirage vs Sidecar.

Get started

Setup takes about ten minutes.

  1. Install Mirage Host on your Mac. Download it from ethanlipnik.com, grant Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions, and let it run in the menu bar.
  2. Set up Tailscale for remote access (optional). Install Tailscale on both your Mac and iPad. Sign in on both. Your Mac is now reachable from outside your home network.
  3. Download Mirage on your iPad. Grab it free from the App Store, open it, and tap your Mac's name. You're connected.