How to mirror your iPhone with a Lightning USB cable in OS X Yosemite

Patrick Wong
1 min readOct 17, 2014

If you’re on OS X Yosemite, you can now easily create screen captures and mirror your iOS device to your computer using your Lightning USB cable and QuickTime. This is super useful for presenting live demos of your app or prototypes without having to worry about your wi-fi connection, which is often an issue with other mirroring apps. This feature also works great for recording usability sessions with users and documenting UI bugs.

Step 1

Connect your iPhone directly to your Mac using your Lightning to USB cable.

Step 2

Open QuickTime Player and choose File > New Movie Recording

Step 3

Select your iPhone as the Camera using the dropdown menu to the right of the record button

Now your phone should be mirrored onto your Mac. Optionally, you can also record a screen capture of your device.

Hopefully this helps!
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