How do I tell Lion to disable the LCD screen even when the lid is open?

Mac OS 10.8.2

MacBook Air 11" 1.6 i5 - 4 Gb Ram

As I can remember, first I entered the command chenga.8 posted

Saludos,

G.

Felix Lieb wrote:

None of those work on 10.8.2

The only way it currently works for me is to reboot with the boot-arg.

When waking the MBP up from standby with the lid closed, it will go back to standby immediately. When I open the lid after waking up from standby, the internal screen is switched on. So it's only possible by rebooting with the lid closed. After booting it can be opened and won't be turned on.

Hi Felix,

first of all your not meant to put your MBP on standby... your only supposed to set a hot corner to set your display to sleep, not the actual MBP.

The MBP should still continue powered on and this does work.

here's exactly how i did it. if you want i can make a video of me doing it and post to youtube?

anyway here's exactly what i do and i will explain a few mistakes that i was making where i THOUGH i was following the instructions exactly but making small mistake.

• plug in the external monitor and have everything ready and working. meaning have the MBP turned on and have your external monitor turned on and hooked up and displaying a screen.
• I find that this will work better with mirroring turned OFF.
• okay so next you simply open system preferences and set (as I do) the bottom left corner to put the display to sleep (not the whole system)
• then move the mouse over to that corner and both screens will go to sleep.
• wait 6seconds ...
• DO NOT move the mouse or press the keyboard!!! (very important... if you move the mouse or keyboard this will not work)
• then simply after 6 seconds or so, open the MBP lid again without pressing the keyboard or mouse and the external monitor should be the only one to come back to life.

Also I would try this initially with the power cord plugged in so to stop your MBP from going straight to sleep when you close the lid. If it continues to go to sleep when you close the lid let me know.

This should work for you if you make that

(A) the MBP is not actually going to sleep when you close the lid and

(B) that you do not move the mouse or press keyboard before opening the lid again.

I hope this works for you and others as i can imagine you must be very frustrated.

By the way, I would not be returning the MBP if this didn't work as its an absolute powerhouse and works so much better than any other laptop and I put my machine under some serious stress...

best of luck... 😎

Message was edited by: Leeroy21 - bullet points not showing up???

Leeroy21, I posted this ages ago.... and it doesn't work on 10.8.2

oh right, sorry so... guess i wont be updating so, worked out well for me then at least now i know not to upgrade - leaves me wondering why would apple remove such a fix?

just like flash, its as if they dont want poeple to be able to use monitors so they have to buy imacs ... bad on you apple!

just fix it - come on!!!! 21 pages of poeple moaning COME ON!!!!😠

Rage bump.

Paging Bill Lerach for a class action. No wonder I have to replace my equipment every two years when the logic board blows up like mine did today on my 2009 Macbook Pro. No doubt from the GPU being over taxed needlessly.

Total BS.

Yes, exactly the same thing has happened to me. Apple MacBook Pro 2.9Ghz, late 2008 model maxed out on Ram with SSD. Bricked. Logic board gone. Replacement board is £1200 (less if you trade in your broken one) + labour.

Coincidentally I used to run it in clamshell mode ALL the time (with lid open obviously)

first all the plastic cracked around the hinge. Then the battery expanded by about 2cm (causing the mouse pad to cease working) - meaning i had to throw the battery away with less than 100 cycles. then the logic board went Kaput. I had apple care (at £300) but all the faults emerged just as the three year period ended.

These machines don't seemed to be designed to handle constant use of an external monitor.

I had the unit on a stand, in a well ventilated area (always plugged into a power supply)

Unibody is lovely, but when it's a brick suddenly the build quality is less relevant than the lifespan of the product. Apple seem to specialise in built-in obselescence. iFixit testify to that.

I knew it I shouldn't have upgraded! After all this discussion, there is no way to have this working as in Snow Leopard, that is wake up the macbook from sleep (lid closed) with a bluetooth or usb device, then open the lid and the internal monitor will remain switched off. The maximum I got for now is that if I reboot and arrive past the login screen with the lid closed, then it stays off, but just until the first time I put it back to sleep .

This is so bad! 1440x900 pixels more to compute for the GPU, constantly. Please Apple do something!

Bump. No fix yet.

What is the hold up Apple? Why can you only shut off the internal display in Windows?

is aboslutely unbelievable. I switched from PC to mac 6 months ago and I just realized this impediment, and I just don't believe it!!

Why not just crank the brightness all the way down using the keyboard shortcut on the MacBook? When you do that on the MacBook display while plugged in, it turns it all the way off.

I do this fairly often when I don't need to work with dual monitors, but might make use of it again later on in the day. Pretty easy, and takes less than 5 seconds.

Well, yip, this thread has become hhuuuuge and I understand reading it all is not possible within one human life.

Turning off the display-light will not turn off the display. This has several disadvantages:

The resolution, that has to be calculated by the GPU is still internal + external screen leading to a lot more consumption of computing power and memory leading to higher temperature leading to reduced lifetime. In addition to that it's pretty inconvenient to have a black hole on one of your edges where your mouse will disappear.

Apart from that it's just ridiculous, even pathetic, that the "best operating system in the world" is not capable of simply switching screens.

Well I officially have had enough of this.

I actully got ****** off enough to sell my Macbook Pro and buy a Mac Mini instaed. Screw all this crap trying to circumvent it. I have had nothing but probelms since upgrading to mountain lion and lion wasn't plain sailing either. Should have stayed with Snow Leopard... Oh well...

/Rant.

Good luck to you guys though. This thread was a huge help during the upgrade to Lion and definitely made life a little easier!

Hope you all get an actual fix but personally I don't think it's gona happen.

Okay... so then why not close the lid on the MBP? Or, unplug the thunderbolt/display port cable if you no longer have a use for the larger display?

I agree perhaps a physical power button on external monitors might be nice 😉 But that's the only real difference in software here. Shut the lid, or power down the display. In Apple's case, you have to pull the plug on the external display.

Cody, the road to hеll is paved with good intentions. None of what you say applies to anything in this thread.

There is no way to power off the internal display without risking your logicboard incinerating. You cannot simply power off the internal display in OSX, only in windows.

Fix The Bugs Please wrote:

Cody, the road to hеll is paved with good intentions. None of what you say applies to anything in this thread.

There is no way to power off the internal display without risking your logicboard incinerating. You cannot simply power off the internal display in OSX, only in windows.

It does apply generally there Fix The Bugs. Exactly as you said, you cannot power off the internal display under OS X. Period. But why is this an issue? It's not.

I don't think you comprehended my message as well as you could've if you read it again 😉 Translation: why not just use the machine as intended? Close the lid on the MBP if you're not needing the display. I have a hard time believing that the wireless signal is THAT bad versus when it's open. If there is that big of a difference, you need to do a better job setting up your wireless network for the location you're working in or test for the best placement of your notebook.

There is NO need to turn off your display by any other means. By resorting to a command-line hack to force off your screen because you like to leave your lid open while connected to an external monitor, but not use the keyboard or screen etc. you're just being downright.... silly. We'll go with that explanation.

There's just no 100% logical reasoning for fighting to try and find a solution to this other-wise no existent problem. Improve the placement of your wireless router.... and close the freaking lid of your MacBook if you don't want the display on while connected to a monitor.

Also... for those who are worried about just dimming your screen down using "extra power and processing horsepower" blah blah blah. Are you joking? One, it's not reducing the lifespan of your laptop by any quantifiable measure and secondly, when you're in dual-monitor mode usually you'll be docked... making the power drain issue a moot point. I could go on for ages how silly this is.

Please.... no GPU is going to blow up simply because you're pusing some extra pixels to display wall-paper on a secondary screen you're not doing anything with. Are you guys for real?