I and Callie took the kids to Salt Lake a while back so they could go to the Children’s Museum at the Gateway. They had a great time. At the end of the day we wandered around the area a bit and since there is an Apple store I dropped in to see if they could solve my problem.
I told my wife it would only be a few minutes. Several hours later a finally got to talk to some high school kid that knew how to turn on the Mac and crop a photo in Photoshop but other than that they were pretty worthless. At least the store looks cool.
My journey to the Apple store started when I switched my monitory input. I have a 24” Dell monitor and I plug my Macbook Pro into that. As long as I used my DVI to VGA adapter the Macbook Pro would automatically detect when the monitor was plugged in. I figured that since I used my Mac almost exclusively these days I would use the DVI input for the better picture. However, when I started plugging directly into the DVI cable the Macbook Pro no longer recognized when the monitor was plugged in or not plugged in. This is a minor annoyance, but it bugged me so I determined to find a solution which is how I ended up at the Apple store.
They were no help at all and wasted a lot of my time and my poor wife had to wander around the gateway with the kids while I waited (Of course they couldn’t let me leave the store and just call my cell. I had to sit there). Did I mentioned that my trip to the Apple store was a total waste?
I had guessed for a while that it might have something to do with the cable. I being cheap didn’t want to buy a new one (I know I should have borrowed one) to test. I just assumed that the Apple geeks would know whether or not a cable would matter. They didn’t.
It turns out the cable is the issue. So if you find that your Mac doesn’t automatically recognize the monitor check the cable. It won’t work with a single link DVI cable, but will work with a dual link DVI cable.
Here’s a single link DVI cable. You don’t want this one:
Here’s a Dual link DVI cable. You do want this one:
The only visible difference is the pin count. The Single link DVI doesn’t have the pins in the middle.
