If you worked at an office job before the novel coronavirus pandemic, there’s a good chance you’re now working from home. It can feel limiting, especially if you only have a MacBook.
Fortunately, you can drastically improve your productivity by hooking up an external monitor to your workstation, usually by using one display as a reference and doing your actual work in the other. (Less wholesomely, you could work in one and watch a movie in another—but I didn’t say that.) An HDMI-compatible TV should do the trick if you don’t have an extra monitor sitting around, but the pixel density and refresh rates likely won’t be as satisfying.
First off—here’s the bad news. It’s usually a lot easier to hook up an external monitor to a PC rather than a Mac, as you can usually just use any ol’ HDMI cable. You’re almost certainly going to need some kind of a dongle with a contemporary Mac. On the other hand, the Apple ecosystem now lets you easily use newer iPads as secondary monitors within seconds, so it does bring clear advantages. Below, we’ll walk you through the most common options.
