Thursday, 15 March 2018

Using a Mac as a second display

As previously noted (here), my old 8 core i7 iMac broke and was subsequently fixed.  In the intervening time, I had bough a new core i5 retina iMac, so the 2009 model is a little bit surplus.  What to do with it?

One option was to use it as a secondary display for the new Mac.  So I bought the correct Thunderbolt to Mini display-port adapter (link to follow), plugged it and suddenly I have 2 27inch displays.  The 2nd was a bit bright, but I discovered the keyboard on the old iMac still works, and I can change the brightness with the function keys.  Great, but that got me thinking.

If the keyboard is still working, what about the rest of the machines.  Articles on the web mention that you can still play music through the iMac while it is being used as a monitor, so what else is working?  As it turns out, everything.

I fired up screen sharing and connected to the old iMac and got the complete screen that I would have seen had the screen not been used in target display mode.  Everything works; Safari, Terminal, Photos, iTunes.  So, if I do need to connect to it and use some of that spare horsepower for video conversion, it's available and can be used.  Big tick for Apple, there.

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