Ever get the sense that OS X Yosemite isn't quite fully baked?
That's how I feel especially when I depend on Continuity features like Instant Hotspot. Continuity in Yosemite and iOS 8 makes the experience of using a Mac and iOS device much more fluid and seamless. You can take and make phone calls from your Mac, continue composing an email on your phone with a swipe, read a web page on your Mac that you started on your iPad and more. I still feel like it's a work in progress, however.
One ongoing problem I've had is with Instant Hotspot, the feature that enables your Mac to connect to your iPhone to use it as a Wi-Fi hotspot, without making you do any settings toggling on the iPhone itself.
Like many aspects of Continuity between Yosemite and iOS 8, when it works, it's terrific. I pop open my Mac's Wi-Fi menu my iPhone pops right up, ready to connect me to the Internet on those increasingly-rare occasions where I don't have any other way to access the 'net.
Like other aspects of Continuity, Instant Hotspot is maddeningly inconsistent. Some days it works wonderfully. Other days it doesn't work at all. Quite often it works, but only after I sit there with the Wi-Fi menu open on the Mac, sometimes for a minute or so, before the iPhone will appear. This isn't a new problem — it's dogged me ever since OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 made their debut last fall. I've tried resetting the iPhone and I've even done a clean install on the Mac, all to no avail.
That tells me that Instant Hotspot is a work in progress. And I have no doubt that Apple will ratchet it down and get it working better when OS X 10.11 makes its inevitable debut later this year.
That's how I feel with so much of the Continuity features rolled out in Yosemite — that they're works in progress, not entirely baked yet, but tantalizingly close.
Perhaps I'm unrealistic, but I'm an Apple user who just wants — and really expects — my gear to work right the first time, every time. I don't want to spend precious minutes troubleshooting my connectivity or my devices to try to get things working. I just expect them to, y'know, work.
I know that not everyone is having problems like I am, but I know many who are, so it's not an isolated issue that I'm talking about. Here's to hoping that with the next versions of OS X and iOS, Apple can get things working right the first time, every time.
How about you? Is Instant Hotspot flaking out for you? Or are there other aspects to OS X/iOS Continuity that confound or frustrate you? Sign off in the comments — let me hear them.
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