I tested Mirage for streaming my Mac to my iPad, and it nails almost everything
Hands on with Mirage, a new app that streams your Mac to iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro in Retina quality
Mirage is a brand new app from developer Ethan Lipnik that streams your Mac's display to just about every other screen in your Apple ecosystem, including iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, and even another Mac.
I've spent time putting it through real use, and the short version is that it delivers on almost everything it promises. There's one nagging caveat, but even with it, Mirage is the best version of this idea I've used.
What Mirage actually does
You leave a powerful Mac at home, a Mac Studio or a Mac mini and you carry a much lighter device around. Mirage lets that lighter device borrow the Mac's entire desktop with full Retina quality, so your iPad effectively becomes a window into the machine doing the heavy lifting.
It goes further than a basic mirror, though. You can stream your whole desktop, use your device as a genuine second display, or pull across individual app windows (up to eight at once on Pro) when you only need one Mac app but otherwise want to stay in iPadOS. On a ProMotion iPad it supports dynamic frame rates, and your Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil come along for the ride, with the Pencil's pressure and tilt forwarded back to the Mac.
There's a clever Mac to Mac angle too. That aging iMac gathering dust can become a second monitor for your main machine, and if you connect the two with a USB cable, the stream gets enough of a boost to make even a 5K iMac viable. Vision Pro owners get the same treatment, and if you run something like Tailscale on both ends, you can reach your home Mac from anywhere.
How it held up in my testing
I tested Mirage across several of these scenarios, and it lived up to roughly 98% of what it claims. Retina quality is real, the setup is painless, and the feature list is not marketing fluff. Everything the app says it does, it does.
The 2% is latency. Mirage's own engine, a source available project called Loom, is described this way:
"Remote feels indistinguishable from local."
In my experience, that's not quite true yet. Even with both devices sitting side by side on the same network (and I know network speeds play a role), I noticed a bit of lag. It's not severe, and for most work it fades into the background, but it's there, and a careful eye will catch it. If you're hoping for a connection that feels truly "native", temper that expectation just slightly.
Because Mirage still outperformed every competitor I compared it against. The lag I saw was smaller than what I've put up with elsewhere, and the image quality and feature depth more than make up for it.
Setup is genuinely easy
Mirage doesn't overcomplicate things. You install a host app on your Mac, the Mirage app on your iPhone, iPad, etc and connect, that's basically it.
Thanks to iCloud host syncing, your devices find your Macs on their own, and Proximity Connect creates a direct link when the two are close. Encryption is always on for remote sessions and optional locally, so the convenience doesn't come at the cost of security.
It's worth noting that the whole thing leans on the latest software. You'll need iOS, iPadOS, macOS, or visionOS 26 across your devices, so this is one to keep in mind if you haven't updated yet.
Is it worth paying for?
There's a free tier, and it's more generous than I expected. It gets you local streaming at a standard resolution, 30 frames per second, up to one app window, and Apple Pencil support. That's enough to decide whether the app fits your workflow.
Mirage Pro is where the good stuff lives, uncapped Retina with deeper color, dynamic ProMotion, up to eight app windows, remote access over a VPN, better audio, and always on encryption.
It runs $4.99 a month, $39 a year, or $119 once for lifetime access, with a free trial included.
If you've ever wanted to leave a desktop Mac at home and travel light without giving up its power, Mirage gets you about as close as anything on the market. It isn't flawless, and that sliver of lag keeps it from being absolute magic.
But it's the best take on Mac streaming I've tried, and I'm optimistic the latency is the kind of thing that can improve over time with updates and it's not a deal breaker.
