Making the right cable selection for iPad Pro external display brilliance

Ever since the iPad announced external monitor support, I was pumped. I don’t want to be someone who tells you that you can completely replace your laptop with an iPad… but the potential is there, its definitely not a hardware thing, more of a software situation.

One of the things I hear most people talk about is what cable should I be using to get external monitor support? I empathise with many who ask the question, as there certainly a lot of hit and miss situations, so I wanted to share my personal experience and research in to this trying out HDMI and DisplayPort cables. Perhaps this might help someone, perhaps not, but helping to add to the brain trust on this certainly cannot be a bad thing.

The monitors in testing

One aspect of the external monitor discussion will more than likely be on monitor capabilities, which quite often dictated by resolutions, size and inputs. For this I am going to focus the discussion on modern monitors that support both HDMI and DisplayPort inputs… I am going to skip inputs like USB-C and Thunderbolt 4 for a simple reason, I don’t have any to test, maybe one day.

Specifically for my testing I am going to focus on two different monitors, my work monitor, and my home monitor.

The work monitor is a Dell U3419W monitor, not really an old monitor, but has been out for a few years, for an office set up its a great monitor that serves many use cases, Amazon still sells them so just to link to it you can see it here https://amzn.to/3QpAV0h. This monitor has HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.2 and USB-C (not tested), so all the options are here, they may be a little older on the standards, but still seem to be good to go.

My home monitor, which you would know if you have read my previous articles is a Samsung G9 Odyssey Neo 49” monitor (https://amzn.to/3ICjjwu), I assure you the size of the monitor is not a confidence thing. The Samsung monitor has one DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.1 inputs, and am still very annoyed by the fact that its two HDMI and not two DisplayPorts, as DisplayPorts are certainly better set for better compute experiences while HDMI is better for TV.

The 34” monitor experience