in today's video i'm going to share with you how to hook up an m1 or m2 macbook air up to an external monitor my particular addition is the air and it's loaded with an m1 chip and it has these two usb c ports on the side if your macbook is different and it has a display port on the side i'll link up to my prior video in the cards and you can check that one out this will apply to the latest generation of macbook airs the first thing you need to do is spin your monitor around take a look at the inputs now some only have one and some have multiple this particular monitor has three different inputs we get a dvi in which is a white plug it's kind of antiquated you probably don't need to be using that hdmi which is the one that we're going to focus on in today's video and displayport so if you only have one or the other i'll leave options down in the description so you can get the right dongle for the job but i'm gonna focus today on the hdmi input because that's the most common connection here's the dongle i'd recommend buying this is a multi-function dongle and you'll find these rebranded under many different names on this site over here we have our usbc on this side over here we have our hdmi output now there's so much more to this this also allows you to read from sd cards or micro sd cards it has three usb 3 ports it has a single usb c port usb a port and it also allows you to still charge the computer and i'll show you that now on the outside of the dongle here we have our power input hopefully you heard that and now we're charging through the dongle to the computer and now we still have all of that great io up next you want to plug in a hdmi cable to your monitor and then also into the dongle the great thing about this dongle is the macbook will automatically detect it as an external display and display the native resolution on the external monitor another huge benefit is you can run two screens at the same time if you choose so if you want to have dual monitor display setup or if you just want to use one or the other i'll show you how to do that now i'm going to show you how to customize your display so if you go to the system preferences option head over to displays as you can see now this one on the right is the acer monitor that i just connected if we hover over the other one it says built in retina display now to get to this monitor with our mouse i'd need to go off to the right of the screen which isn't always ideal being that the acer monitor is actually above the built-in display i'm going to put this way around like this so i can move the mouse up and down between monitors this makes a whole lot more sense and i recommend you set this up in a way that works best for you a great example of what i just set up is this i can move this entire panel up to the new screen and there it is i moved it by bringing it up as opposed to bringing it left and right off screen here this makes a whole lot more sense it really allows you to drag and move things around in a really efficient manner there's just two more things to take note of you can mirror your display so if you're working with an external keyboard and mouse you can close the lid and work that way and everything will just come up on the main screen this is pretty cool secondly if you want your toolbar to showcase on the main monitor or the new external monitor we need to change the orientation from the external monitor being on the top to the bottom and that's where you'll see all those icons appear this mobile also be good if you plan on closing the lid over and just working on this particular screen here either in mirrored mode or just as a single device thanks for watching folks my name's shane please let me know if this video has been helpful by leaving a thumbs up or commenting below or both and don't forget to subscribe if you're into these kind of videos what i'm also going to do is leave a list of dongles down in the description at different price points that will all work going out to an external display i'll also list a little bit about each of them so you know exactly what you're buying this particular one is very functional but it might be overkill for some people who just want a very simple solution so all the listings down there will work for getting your macbook to an external monitor thanks again for watching catch you soon see ya