Connecting an External Display

If you have an extra external display — a monitor, television set, or projector — just lying around, you can connect it to MacBook Air for various scenarios:

bullet.tif As an alternative display. You can use the external display instead of MacBook Air’s built-in monitor.

bullet.tif As a desktop extension. You can use the external display to extend the MacBook Air desktop.

Fortunately, both of these connection types are plug-and-play (meaning once you plug in and turn on the external display, MacBook Air recognizes the new device right away). That’s the good news. The bad news is that although using an external monitor is plug-and-play, the plug part isn’t as straightforward as you might like because there are many ways to connect a MacBook Air to a display. The next few sections provide you with the details you need to make things happen.

Understanding external display connections

To connect MacBook Air and an external display, you need to know the various ways these connections can occur. The next few sections provide you with the details.

Thunderbolt connections

As I mentioned earlier, the fourth- and fifth-generation MacBook Airs come with a Thunderbolt port. Thunderbolt supports both data transfer devices (for example, hard drives and RAID arrays) and high-resolution ...

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