The great MacBook video adapter fiasco

I own a MacBook. Generally I like Apple products. But when it comes to the video output, they get it completely wrong.

The MacBook has a non-standard video port for hooking up an external monitor.

This is called a mini-DVI port. There is no display device manufactured on this planet that has a mini-DVI input. If you want to hook this computer up to any monitor, projector, TV or the like, you will need a display adapter. Like one of these:



I have a DVI monitor in my home office, so I use the one in the upper-left corner. I bought one much like the upper-right to hook up my MacMini to my TV. And I ended up buying the bottom one for projecting my portfolio in the various interviews I've been on. ("Collect them all!" Indeed.)

Now, anyone with a Mac laptop who has ever projected is intimately familiar with the DVI-to-VGA adapter:




One might think that one could simply hook the DVI-to-VGA adapter into the miniDVI-to-DVI and end up with a miniDVI-to-VGA adapter. One would be wrong.

For some strange reason, the large, flat pin on the male side of the DVI connector is too wide to fit into the female DVI socket. There are apparently minutely different, yet completely incompatible versions of the DVI connector. How user-unfriendly. Hence why I ended up completing my set of adapters at the last minute.

So my question is, why all the complexity here? Can't there be a single connector that will work with all display devices and computers? Apple is trying to create one in the new DisplayPort, but even they have immediately broken the standard and created a mini-DisplayPort requiring, yes... an adapter to hook it into a standard DisplayPort. *sigh*

Comments

[Jeff Gonzales]

I feel your pain. To make matters worse, the new macbooks changed their adapters to a smaller "mini display port", so now all your previous adapters don't work. Have fun making Apple rich buying a whole new collection!