Based on what? AirPlay mirroring is great today, and this is that with data in the other direction. Current Wifi is perfectly capable of bidirectional voice and video. Adding touch/key events is incremental.
That might be a sign of excessive congestion on the channel used for Airplay. Esp with device to device direct link, latency should be minimal. If you can, try moving nearby AP’s off the AirPlay channels for your region. For the US: “If possible, avoid using Wi-Fi channels 149 and 153 in rooms where peer-to-peer AirPlay is frequently in use”
Same, I do this regularly when my wife’s using my desk, the latency is a bit like cloud gaming – it’s there for competitive Counter Strike, it isn’t there for coding or browsing.
Apple would not be releasing iPhone mirroring if the latency were terrible. If they had a low bar for latency, they’d have released iPhone mirroring ten years ago. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines do not specify an exact maximum number of milliseconds for interface latency. However, they emphasize the importance of responsiveness and recommend that any user interface should feel instantaneous and fluid to create a positive user experience. The general goal is to keep latency as low as possible to ensure interactions feel immediate and natural.
I'd like to use it for watching Netflix/Hulu/etc on a plane on a larger screen than my phone without being forced to carry an iPad.
I really wish Apple would just force companies to enable their iPhone/iPad apps on Apple Silicon. But if I could display a video from my phone onto my 15" laptop screen, that would be a nearly as nice.
You can already AirPlay from an iOS device to a Mac– doing this on a plane is a bit trickier because of the networking setup though. I think I have managed to successfully do it once by either
1. doing some sort of tethering/creating a local wifi network on my Mac
2. connecting both devices to the in flight wifi
I use AirPlay to my Mac (and external monitors) even at home since I can watch the 4K feed from apps, which isn't available for some services if you use the web browser (cough HBO cough),
This is occasionally quite useful. A few weeks ago, my phone's display went haywire, and the only way I could operate it to secure a backup was through the somewhat hidden mirroring functionality via QuickTime screen recording.
The only use case for iPhone Mirroring I can think of is online shopping, when I'm trying to finalize transaction on my Mac, but then realize that I have to login to my banking app to confirm payment, and my iPhone is in another room... I guess you can call that "an emergency".
And of course, there are all those MFA apps which I need for work...
I’m fully expecting this to just be a ported version of the Vision Pro’s feature that allows a Virtual Desktop of your Mac. In that context, it seemed to have extremely low latency.
I suspect it will only be useful for emergencies as latency will be terrible, though.