Yes, you can get SMS, i.e. text messages, on your Mac (and iPad!) via your iPhone.

I heard from many people, and I applaud your diligence and your experience, it takes a village to use a device these days, especially since there’s essentially no tech help (unless you pay for AppleCare, which I do have on my two computers, but I find researching online usually gets me the answer faster, and the low-level people you first get connected to are for bozos, their questions are along the line of “Is it plugged in?,” but I must say, when you get kicked upstairs, the techs are incredible and on the case, they’ll work on the problem, they’ll call you back, and that’s what you’ve got Applecare for, other than the physical breakdown, for the answers to the unanswerable, to you anyway, although oftentimes when you’re flummoxed you find out it’s a glitch.)

ANYWAY, you can get both iMessages and SMS on your computer.

Many people don’t know this (although all the people who e-mailed me do!)

And if you read the following tech note, easily digestible with color, from Apple, it will explain it all.

Set up SMS and MMS messaging

Scroll down to: “Set up SMS and MMS messaging” to enable the SMS forwarding feature.

In other words, I don’t want you to get overwhelmed by a whole page of information, not that it’s incomprehensible, but today with tech when it works it works and we oftentimes don’t like to mess with it.

But ANYWAY, based on my conversations out in the field, it appears that many people do not have the iMessage/text-forwarding feature enabled on their Macs, and once they do, they’ll enter a state of nirvana.

It’s a pain in the ass to type lengthy messages on a device.

But on a regular keyboard?

I’m always astounding people by sending lengthy replies to their iMessages, they’re wowed by how fast I can type, but what they don’t know is that I’m doing it on a full-sized keyboard connected to a computer, not on my iPhone!