External Display - IPad (6th generation)

[Ernie]

I'm having trouble connecting my IPad to an external monitor via a lightening port/HDMI. With a PC, I choose the "Extend Display" or "Duplicate Display". Does MAC have some similar setting?

[Ken]

I'm having trouble connecting my IPad to an external monitor via a lightening port/HDMI. With a PC, I choose the "Extend Display" or "Duplicate Display". Does MAC have some similar setting?

I've been using iPads for years. They have never been very usable with an external display if you just want to mirror or extend your existing display. Part of the problem is that iOS is touch-based and not really designed to work on an external screen that you can't touch.

There are clunky work-arounds and you can do things like cast to an external display for doing things like slide shows and presentations. But there isn't any good way that I'm aware of to use an older iPad with an external display like you would do with an ordinary Windows laptop.

With the new iPad Pro you can connect the UCB-C port on the iPad to an external monitor and get screen mirroring. But the resolution and screen quality is pretty poor. I’m doing that right now just to test it. I connected the USB-C cable from my laptop hub into the iPad. But the image is pretty ugly as it converts to iPad screen resolution and size and is pretty washed out with big black bars on the sides. There is no setting, you just plug it in, wait a bit and the image appears. It only mirrors, there is no extend screen option that I can find. I think if you have an older iPad with a lightning port rather than a USB-C port it is more problematic.

Here is Apple's directions for doing it with older Lightning port iPads. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/co ... cde/ipados Apparently you need a special adapter cable. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD82 ... av-adapter I used to have one as I recall, but I only ever used it to connect the iPad to a projector for doing PowerPoint type presentations and slide shows, not regular use with an external monitor. As I recall, when you do this, only a limited number of iPad apps actually support displaying images to an external monitor. Most of them don't. So you don't really get true screen mirroring. What you get is that some apps like pictures and Keynote will let you project images or slide shows onto an external monitor. But you don't really just get a larger better resolution image that you can use for things like say photo or video editing.