The other day, during my last class session of the Web Design course I was teaching this past semester, all of a sudden I could not use my iPhone’s hotspot to connect to the internet. This never had happened to me before. But then, I was now on macOS Ventura and the school tech support was not on site that day, whatever that might have meant for privately owned computers on campus that day.

In such a case, in order for your iPhone’s hotspot to be connected to your MacBook Pro, you have to go into System Settings, which can be found under the Apple icon in the MacBook Pro navigation menu at the top left of the screen, and then under WiFi in the left sidebar. It looks like this:

And then like this:

You need to manually connect your iPhone’s hotspot to your computer from inside System Settings. I guess that provides an extra layer of security.

If you suddenly can no longer connect your iPhone’s hotspot the old way, simply by turning it on on the iPhone itself, that is because Ventura is making you connect from within your MacBook Pro Apple M1Max!

The reason I had to go in and connect manually from inside my MacBook Pro’s System Settings was because of something to do with the School WiFi in relation to my Mac. At home, I have never had to connect my iPhone hotspot to my MacBook Pro that way. I really don’t know what the story with that was, because it did not happen anywhere else, but this is the solution if you ever come across such a situation over a network that is not your own.

Happy iPhone Hotspotting!

Related Resources

• Use an iPhone or iPad to connect your Mac to the internet