Investing the money in an external display for your new MacBook Air is well worth it considering its great multitasking capabilities. And it is that an additional screen represents a significant improvement in productivity by being able to have more than one application open at the same time and on different desktops.
But this plugin is also useful for projecting your video content on a much larger screen.
The way to connect a MacBook Air laptop with an Apple M1 processor to an external display or television with an HDMI port is quite simple. Just have a USB-C to digital AV multiport adapter that plugs into your computer (preferably the one sold by Apple) and a standard HDMI cable that plugs into an HDMI port on your monitor or TV.
Connect a MacBook Air to a display using cables
First, turn on the external display or HDMI compatible TV.
Insert the USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter into the USB Type-C port on your MacBook Air. Then use the HDMI output of this adapter to connect your Mac to the external display with the respective HDMI cable.
Now, it only remains to choose the mode of use of the external screen. By default, the OS X system projects an extended desktop on the external monitor, so if what you want is to duplicate the screen, you will have to do the following
Click the apple icon and select System Preferences > Display > Arrangement. Select Mirror Display.
Connect your MacBook Air to a monitor or TV wirelessly
However, there is also the possibility of wirelessly projecting the screen of your MacBook Air to a monitor or television. All that is required is that this screen is connected to an Apple TV device or is an AirPlay 2 compatible smart TV, for example, a Samsung TV, LG, Hisense Roku TV, among others.
The steps to make this connection are very simple.
First, connect your MacBook Air and Apple TV device (or AirPlay-enabled smart TV) to the same Wi-Fi network.
Next, enable AirPlay on your computer. For this, click on the Apple icon and go to System Preferences > Displays. Select the Show AirPlay options in menu bar when available check box.
Now you just have to click on the AirPlay icon located in the menu bar of your Mac and choose from the available screens.
Image by yoke fuchiwaki from Pixabay