Understand your displays
Apple tends to simplify where connectors are concerned; the original iMac obliterated proprietary ports in favour of USB, and the new MacBook Pro has only Thunderbolt 3 and a headphone jack. However, Macs have featured various display connectors over the past decade or so, and their different capabilities potentially complicate buying a display.
Macs have featured various display connectors with different capabilities over the years
If you have a new MacBook Pro and the money, go for a Thunderbolt 3 display. They’re pricey, but look great and simplify connectivity to a single cable, even carrying data to any USB ports they have. However, cheaper options from the likes of Dell tend to
Make the connection DVI
Various flavours of DVI existed from 1999, and started arriving on Macs with 2002’s PowerBook G4 and Power Mac G4. A year later, a Mini-DVI port was introduced on the 12-inch PowerBook G4, and later added to many other Macs before being phased out in favour of Mini DisplayPort. offer a larger selection of ports. Dell’s U2715H, for example, has HDMI, Mini DisplayPort and DisplayPort, enabling its use with a wide range of recent (and not so recent) Macs. You just have to ensure before buying a display that your Mac’s capable of driving it – see ‘What your Mac can do’ to the left.
Be mindful of optimal resolutions. As well as a screen’s size, consider its pixel dimensions; if two have a 2560x1440-pixel resolution but one of them is several inches larger than the other, content on the bigger one will appear less sharp since there are fewer pixels per inch. Displays with a high pixel density (Apple calls its own of this kind a ‘Retina display’) vastly increase the pixel count, but are more costly and need a fairly recent Mac to run; see apple.co/2iVquUf for details.
HDMI
This connector is commonly used in HDTVs and related kit. It first showed up on the Mac mini in 2010. 2012’s MacBook Pro with Retina display and the 2013 revision to the Mac Pro also gained an HDMI port. Most 2010 or later Macs without one can connect to a display that has an HDMI input by using an adaptor.