Why no "ON/OFF" switch on the display

Slightly off topic, but it seems that Control is the prefix to the key combinations according to Apple's keyboard shortcuts ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343) - I thought it'd make more sense going left-to-right.. 🙂

Button or no button - Setting the the display to sleep automatically (Energy Saver in System Preferences) helps save a tree!

Hi JO,

Simply put it doesn't need one. While this is cool, it isn't necessarily a great thing. Here is an excerpt of a review of the display from Appleinsider.com.

"What might surprise most is the absence of a power button. Keeping with Steve Jobs' seeming fear of buttons, the new display reacts automatically. Plug a powered device (even a sleeping MacBook) into the DisplayPort jack, and it turns on; remove the cable, and it turns off. There's a certain wonderful simplicity to this, but it also limits your choices for when the display will activate. You can't turn the display off with the computer still running, and nor does the button serve to put both the display and the computer to sleep at the same time. It also makes unplugging peripherals difficult when a connected system is asleep, as there's no way to elegantly do that without first waking the computer and the display at the same time."

I think that sums it up nicely and yeah, it is a little strange.
Enjoy!

Except that info is not entirely true. I've set my lower right corner of my display to "put display to sleep" in Expose. If I absolutely have to turn my display off, I just move the cursor to that bottom right corner. Simple.

WGrose wrote:
Except that info is not entirely true. I've set my lower right corner of my display to "put display to sleep" in Expose. If I absolutely have to turn my display off, I just move the cursor to that bottom right corner. Simple.

Yep, same here - works great.

what about when you move your mouse away though? Doesn't the display come "back to life"

It seems that you can't shut the display off and use your notebook without unplugging it.

...or you can press Shift-Control-Eject (10.5+)

Or is it Ctrl-Shift-Eject?