Back to My Mac

» see apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I missed this one on hardware. Back to My Mac needed two Macs, one sitting at home and one with you, both signed into the same Apple account. In Turkey in 2007 a Mac was an import-priced object you read about before you ever saw one in a room. The remote-access problem got solved the way engineers solved it that decade, with ssh and a forwarded port configured by hand.

What Apple shipped in October 2007 with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was the opposite of that. You ticked a box in the.Mac preference pane and the other machine appeared in the Finder sidebar, wherever it happened to be. File sharing worked. Screen sharing worked. You never opened a port and never had to learn what your home IP address was that week.

Underneath, wide-area Bonjour handled the discovery, with dynamic DNS updates telling Apple's servers where each machine currently lived, and IPsec handled the tunnel. It punched the hole using UPnP or Apple's own NAT-PMP, so the router opened its own door without anyone logging into the router. The IETF eventually wrote the whole thing up as RFC 6281, which is a strange destiny for a checkbox in System Preferences.

It also cost money for its first four years. Back to My Mac was a.Mac feature first, and it followed the subscription into MobileMe before landing in iCloud in 2011 as something free. That should have been the moment it got popular. It never quite did, and the reason is the same reason it eventually died: almost nobody owns two Macs.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was actually for ~

The advertised use was your own files. You were on a laptop in an airport and the presentation was on the iMac in the study, so you dragged it across and nobody had to know how. That is a narrow need, and it is the kind of need that gets solved a second time by Dropbox, which arrived the year after Leopard and asked you to own nothing in particular.

The use it got remembered for was less tidy. In April 2008 an Apple Store employee whose MacBook had been stolen used Back to My Mac to reach the machine, then triggered the built-in iSight and captured a photograph of the person using it. That story circulated for years as a party trick, and it is also an accurate description of what the feature was: a permanent encrypted way into an unattended computer somewhere else, authorized by nothing but an account password.

~ how it actually ended ~

On 9 August 2018 Apple quietly updated a support document to say that Back to My Mac would not be part of macOS Mojave. No announcement, no stage time, just a page called "How to transition from Back to My Mac" appearing where there had not been one. The document was updated again on 31 May 2019 to say the services were being switched off for every other version of macOS as well, on 1 July.

The transition Apple suggested was three separate products doing what one checkbox had done. iCloud Drive for the files and a VPN for anything that needed a real network path. Screen sharing over an Apple ID still worked, but you now had to know the other machine's Apple ID and have someone accept, which defeats the entire premise of reaching a computer nobody is sitting at.

~ what came after ~

Nothing about the underlying problem got easier after 2019. Carrier-grade NAT spread while IPv6 arrived unevenly, and home routers kept shipping with UPnP off by default for good reasons. The people who wanted what Back to My Mac gave them ended up on mesh VPNs instead, on WireGuard and the products built over it, which solve the same discovery-and-tunnel problem with the same trick and charge for it.

Apple kept the parts. Bonjour is still how your printer announces itself, and the iCloud account is still the identity that stitches your devices together. What went away was the specific promise that a machine you owned in another city was just there, in a sidebar, with no setup between you and it. That promise was rare, and it turns out it was expensive to keep.

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