Many users are looking for the possibility of being more productive and this can happen by having a second screen on the desktop. It may seem silly, but working on two screens is something extremely comfortable since we can have several windows open and in our view at the same time.
Surely you are thinking that you should spend a lot of money on a secondary screen for your Mac. But the truth is that if you have an iMac you also have an external screen thanks to the ‘destination screen’ function . In this article we explain what it is and also how you can activate it.
Compatible iMac models
Unfortunately not all Macs in the company support this interesting feature. We must weigh that in general the iMac with retina display cannot make use of the target display function. This is why the list of compatible iMac equipment is as follows:
- 27-inch iMac from late 2009.
- 27-inch iMac from mid-2010.
- iMac from mid-2011 to mid-2014.
Use iMac with Thunderbolt as external display
In the event that you have an iMac with a Thunderbolt port , you can connect it to any other Mac that also has this type of door. In order to identify if this is your case, you should look for a port with a small lightning bolt on the back of the iMac. If this is your case, you should now have in your possession a cable that at both ends has a Thunderbolt connection.
Once we have all these elements located, simply follow the following steps to use the iMac as an external screen:
- Connect with the Thunderbolt cable to both the iMac and the Mac.
- Turn on both computers.
- Press the Command + F2 keys at the same time on the iMac keyboard that we are going to use as the target screen. At this very moment we can see on the iMac screen the content we have on our Mac.
In case you want to reproduce the sound of the second Mac through the speakers of the iMac in question, we simply have to go to the System Preferences. Once here we will move to the ‘Sound’ section and then to ‘Exit’. In this section of the equipment settings we can choose the iMac as the output device.
Use an iMac with Mini DisplayPort as external display
There will be some users who specifically have a 27 ″ iMac that has a Mini DisplayPort marked on the back as a square between two stripes. In these cases the iMac can be connected to a Mac through Thunderbolt or through another Mini DisplayPort.
In this case there may be problems regarding sound reproduction on the target iMac. In order to check if we are going to have this problem we simply have to go to the system information through the ‘About this Mac’ section. Next we will look for the ‘Audio‘ section in the ‘Hardware’ category. Once here we will see if ‘HDMI Output’ or ‘HDMI / DisplayPort Output’ appears, it can be confirmed that we can transmit the audio to the iMac. But obviously we will have to buy a cable that is compatible for this transfer.
The steps to follow in this case are as follows:
- Connect with the Mini DisplayPort cable to both iMac and Mac.
- Turn on both computers.
- Press the Command + F2 keys at the same time on the iMac keyboard that we are going to use as the target screen. At this very moment we can see on the iMac screen the content we have on our Mac.
As we have previously mentioned, in order to activate the sound transmission we will simply have to go to the sound settings. In the sound tab click in this case on the iMac in the list of devices.
Disable target screen mode
If we finally want to reverse this target mode , Apple includes a simple system to disable it. Simply press the Command + F2 key combination again on the iMac keyboard that we use as the destination screen.
Pressing it automatically will revert the configuration that we have applied, and we can use both computers independently.