Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1.2
Many Thunderbolt devices come with two ports, so you can daisy-chain multiple Thunderbolt devices to your
MacBook Air without requiring a hub.
The latest 27-inch iMacs also come with two Thunderbolt ports.
The fourth-generation (2011) and fifth-generation (2012) MacBook Airs come with a single Thunderbolt port
(shown earlier in Figure 1.1), so you can use it to connect Thunderbolt devices.
Connecting an External Display
If you have an extra external display — a monitor, television set, or projector — just lying around, you can con-
nect it to MacBook Air for various scenarios:
As an alternative display.
You can use the external display instead of MacBook Air's built-in monitor.
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 extern-
al display, MacBook Air recognizes the new device right away). That's the good news. The bad news is that al-
though using an external monitor is plug-and-play, the plug part isn't as straightforward as you might like be-
cause 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 oc-
cur. 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. Thunder-
bolt supports both data transfer devices (for example, hard drives and RAID arrays) and high-resolution dis-
plays. So if you have a Thunderbolt-compatible display, such as the Apple Thunderbolt Display, you can use a
Thunderbolt cable to connect the display to MacBook Air.
If you have a device that uses a different connector type — such as DVI or VGA — you can still use MacBook
Air's Thunderbolt port, but you'll need an adapter. Fortunately, existing Mini DisplayPort adapters (which I talk
about a bit later) work just fine with the Thunderbolt port, so you shouldn't have any trouble connecting other
displays to MacBook Air.
Mini DisplayPort connections
