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Ask HN: Best tool/method to remotely manage a family member's Mac from my Mac?

2 points by leecoursey ↗ HN
I have a sibling with a MacBook Air who lives on the other side of the US from me. She is not particularly computer savvy when it comes to troubleshooting or even configuring software. What is the easiest to use tool I could use to remotely manage her Mac from my Mac across the internet?

5 comments

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mdmglr
TeamViewer works well for my family. However for security reasons I have configured it to not be always on. So I instruct family members to launch it only when they need my help and send me over their ID and passcode.

Another option is Chrome Remote Desktop but I haven’t used it in years.

Also for safety I recommend putting the sibling on a non-admin account. This way there is limited damage they can do.

While Mac OS does have built in Remote Desktop capability you would need to setup access to the network the laptop is on. And you wouldn’t want to expose that server over the net.

smoldesu
Apple has a remote desktop protocol built-in to MacOS[0], and of course bog-standard VNC is a decent fallback if that doesn't work for whatever reason.

[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/remote-desktop/welcome/mac

leecoursey
Does Apple's Remote Desktop work across in the internet (i.e., between two computers not on the same local network)?
smoldesu
Maybe? I've never really used it, I sold my Mac years ago.
cvalka
Chrome remote desktop