Yet Another Way to Turn Off Internal LCD Display of MacBook Pro With Lid Open
We have covered a handful of different ways to disable the internal screen on a MacBook Pro/Air while keeping the laptops lid open and the computer turned on, ranging from a command line approach, dimming brightness or using sleep, and even a silly magnet trick, but for whatever reason there have always been a few users who can’t seem to get any of the methods to work, or they find them cumbersome to bother with. If you fall into that camp, here is yet another approach to disabling the internal screen of a Mac laptop while the lid is open, this method is easy enough and has been verified to work on a variety of MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air machines running OS X Lion or later.
As with the other methods, the MagSafe power cable must be connected to the MacBook in order for this to work.
- Open System Preferences and click “Mission Control”, then click on “Hot Corners”
- Select a hot corner and pull down the menu to select “Put Display to Sleep”
- Now connect the external display to the Mac and move the cursor to the newly created sleep corner to turn off the internal display
- Close the MacBook lid and wait a few seconds before opening the lid again, the internal display should stay off while the external display will be powered on
This approach lets you continue to use the MacBooks built-in keyboard and trackpad too.
For those wondering why you’d want to do this at all, keeping the lid open with the screen off serves these purposes; it allows for maximum cooling of the MacBook because heat dissipates through the keyboard, and it allows the GPU to devote all of it’s power to the external screen. These two perks make this a popular trick for anyone doing intensive graphics work and for gamers.
Thanks to Jared L. for the tip