- Immediate Connection: iMessage
- Sharing Events with FaceTime Video
- Sharing Sounds with FaceTime Audio
- Making Phone Calls from Your Mac or iPad
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Making Phone Calls from Your Mac or iPad
Handling phone calls on your iPhone is easy enough, but sometimes it’s useful to be able to make or take a call on your Mac or iPad. Maybe that device is conveniently in front of you, or maybe your phone only works in one specific spot in your house. Fortunately, with an iPhone running iOS 8 or later, you can use your iPhone as a relay device for phone calls from devices on iOS 8 or Macs running OS X Yosemite.
Just make sure all your devices are logged into the same iCloud account and the same FaceTime account, and that they’re all on the same Wi-Fi network. On your iPhone, visit Settings > FaceTime and enable iPhone Cellular Calls (see Figure 8). Now you’ll be able to make and receive regular calls from the FaceTime apps on your iOS devices or Macs.
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Figure 8 As with text messages, your phone calls are relayed from your iPhone to your Macs and other iOS devices.
Note: When your phone rings, any other device logged into the same accounts will ring as well. This setup can lead to a bit of a cacophony if you have multiple devices; if you want to disable the ringing selectively, visit Settings > FaceTime on your iOS 8 devices or the Preferences section of FaceTime on OS X, and disable iPhone Cellular Calls.
Even when your family members are dispersed to every corner of the Earth, these Apple technologies can make it easy to stay in touch and share important moments. Best of all, most are part and parcel of your existing Macs and iOS devices, so you don’t have to spend any extra money to keep up to date with the rest of your relatives, no matter where they might be.