I own a macbook for 2 years now and only a few months ago I needed to connect my Macbook to an external display “only”, meaning that I want to close the laptop lid and work on a huge external display with an external keyboard and mouse to save the screen and to enjoy everything in a one big screen (I love dual-head too but I hate it when one screen is much bigger that the other).

So, for quite sometime I thought that this is not possible, but it turned out to be possible and pretty easy to do.

Now to the important part ;)

You MUST connect all of the following things first;

  • MagSafe.
  • External Display
  • USB Mouse and USB Keyboard

then close the lid, you will get the system sleeping as you usually do, then click on the mouse and the system will fire up again and shining on the external display :)

It’s a trivial trick but it took me quite sometime to discover and I tested it only on Macbook pro and snow leopard, however, it should still work on any other macbook I suppose.