Beam.win

Beam puts a window from one Mac onto another Mac. Rather than handing you a picture of someone else's desktop, it brings the window itself across: it appears on your desktop at its own size, with its own Dock icon and a place in ⌘Tab, so you can type into it, resize it and use it like any other app on your machine. It is built for people who keep a second Mac running — a Mac mini or a Mac Studio — and want to reach the Terminal, browser and other app windows on that machine from the Mac that is actually in front of them. Install Beam on both Macs, sign in once, pick a window, and it opens on your desktop. Screen sharing hands you a picture of a whole desktop. That works when you need to see everything at once, but it is a poor fit when you only want one application: the window arrives scaled to fit inside a viewer, surrounded by someone else's wallpaper and menu bar, and it does not behave like an app on your own machine. Universal Control is a different tool again — it shares one keyboard and mouse between Macs sitting on the same desk. Beam is aimed at a different situation: the Mac you want to use is in another room, or on a shelf running agents and builds all day, and its windows are the things you actually need. The product's framing is simple: if it has a window, you can beam it — the build on the Studio, the agents on the Mac mini, the song playing in the other room. Beam's central claim is that a beamed window feels native, because it is. The window keeps its own Dock icon and its own place in ⌘Tab, so switching to it is the same gesture you already use for local apps. Drag a corner on your Mac and the real window resizes on the other Mac; keyboard shortcuts land in the app rather than in a remote-control layer. By default the window stays where it is and you use it in place, so anyone sitting at that Mac sees it work. Switch it to Fluid and the window moves to your screen instead, at full resolution. You can grab a single window or take an entire display, beam several windows at once — the build from the Studio and the logs from the mini, side by side on one desktop — and bring a window all the way over, at which point it leaves the other Mac's screen and a small note there says where it went. Because a beamed window is meant to be read and typed into, Beam streams it at your display's exact resolution rather than scaling it to fit a viewer. Text stays crisp, hairline strokes and one-pixel borders survive, and every glyph lands on the exact grid it was hinted for. The site draws the comparison directly: a window, not a video feed. For anyone who spends the day in a terminal or an editor, that difference is the whole point — a scaled-down desktop in a viewer is legible enough to watch, but not something you would want to write code in for hours. Privacy is described as a matter of architecture rather than policy. Windows, keystrokes, clipboard and sound travel straight from Mac to Mac, encrypted, and never pass through Beam's servers. Your account knows your Macs and your plan, never what is on them. Hidden windows and password managers never even reach the picker, on either side, so the list of things you can beam is already filtered before you choose. The same design supports offline use: on your own network your Macs talk to each other directly, and Monthly, Yearly and Lifetime plans keep working for up to 30 days offline, while Free needs a connection for its daily minutes. Beyond the window itself, Beam carries the things you would expect to move with it. Drag a file onto a beamed window, or copy and paste, and it lands on the other Mac. Toggle the speaker and the beamed app's audio plays on the Mac you are sitting at — just that one app, not the whole machine's output. If the device in front of you has no Beam installed, windows can open in a browser tab instead, and a share link opens one window in any browser on any device, with guests joining free. Those links are view only unless you allow control, and they last from an hour to a week. A short demo video on the site shows the browser view in action. The setup is deliberately small. You install Beam on both Macs, sign in once, and the Macs find each other. Same Wi-Fi is enough; adding Tailscale lets the other Mac be in another city. From there you pick a window and it opens on your desktop, live and ready to type into. Headless Macs are welcome — the mini in the closet has no display and no keyboard, but its windows list anyway, which is exactly the configuration where a machine can sit and run work without anyone touching it. The picker is where everything starts: choose a single window, a whole screen, or several at once. The outcome Beam is selling is leverage over hardware you already own. A Mac mini or Studio can keep running agents, builds and long jobs in one place while you work on the Mac in front of you, and you never have to switch desks, plug in a display, or squint at a scaled-down desktop feed. Because windows arrive as windows, the mental overhead of remote access largely disappears: there is no separate picture-in-a-viewer to manage and no coordinate system to learn, just an app in the Dock. And because connections are direct and encrypted, using a machine in another room does not mean routing your work through someone else's servers. Several concrete scenarios appear on the site. Running AI agents on one Mac and using their Terminal and browser windows on another is the headline — the agent keeps working on the machine that stays put while you watch and type from wherever you are. Builds on a Studio are the second: the compile runs on the Studio, the logs show up on your desktop next to your editor. The song playing in the other room is the third, with the speaker toggle bringing just that app's audio across. Headless Macs in a closet are a fourth, since a machine with no display still lists its windows. And share links cover the case where the person on the other end does not have Beam at all. Beam requires two Macs with Apple silicon running macOS Sonoma or later, with the app installed on both. Pricing is organized around the person rather than the machine: one plan covers every Mac you sit at. Free is $0 forever and covers the Macs you connect to — host as many Macs as you like, join any share link, and get 20 minutes a day of everything, with no card required. The subscription unlocks every feature on every Mac all day, is billed $84 a year with a monthly option shown on the pricing page, and starts with 14 days free, one trial per person and per card. Lifetime is $199 once and includes every future update. There is also a team option at $12 a person a month or $84 a year, with every seat 20% off from 10 people, one invoice and a team page to add and remove people. Support runs through hello@beam.win, and the site says refunds are sorted out if Beam cannot be made to work for you. Beam's pitch fits in one line: your other Mac's windows, on this Mac, native, live and sharp. It is a narrow, specific tool — Mac only, Apple silicon only — but it addresses a situation that gets more common as people park a Mac mini or Studio on a shelf to run agents and builds. The combination of native window behavior, exact-resolution rendering and direct encrypted connections is what separates it from screen sharing, and the free tier plus a 14-day trial make it easy to test with the Macs you already have.