Bought a secondhand working ACD from a friend (that's Cinema Display, not Thunderbolt Display) that's currently in transit to me.
I want to connect both an older 2009 17" unibody MBP and a newer 2012 Mac Mini to it and flip between the two when needed. The Mac Mini is also ~7.5 meters from my desk and is using its HDMI into my HDTV already, so can't use that HDMI port.
My idea is to get a long male-female 10m mDP cable for the long trek of the MMini's Tbolt port to my desk (actually through a Tbolt external drive daisy-chained in-between). But couple of other Q's:
(1) Is there an affordable switcher type of device that allows me to switch between the two Macs at will, without having to manually the swap cables over?
(I think I've seen YT vids of people using more than one machine with same external display?)
(2) What is the best way of getting audio into the built-in ACD speakers from the connected MBP (the USB connector on the ACD presumably does this, but with two devices?)?
(given the 17" MBP is DisplayPort only—i.e. not Thunderbolt—and also has an older version of DP that doesn't carry the audio signal like newer DP machines do, and whereas the newer Tbolt MM will do.)
(3) Perhaps the switcher device can handle the audio issue as well?
Please help!
Thanks greatly as I'm pretty flummoxed on what to buy here to resolve the issue.
I want to connect both an older 2009 17" unibody MBP and a newer 2012 Mac Mini to it and flip between the two when needed. The Mac Mini is also ~7.5 meters from my desk and is using its HDMI into my HDTV already, so can't use that HDMI port.
My idea is to get a long male-female 10m mDP cable for the long trek of the MMini's Tbolt port to my desk (actually through a Tbolt external drive daisy-chained in-between). But couple of other Q's:
(1) Is there an affordable switcher type of device that allows me to switch between the two Macs at will, without having to manually the swap cables over?
(I think I've seen YT vids of people using more than one machine with same external display?)
(2) What is the best way of getting audio into the built-in ACD speakers from the connected MBP (the USB connector on the ACD presumably does this, but with two devices?)?
(given the 17" MBP is DisplayPort only—i.e. not Thunderbolt—and also has an older version of DP that doesn't carry the audio signal like newer DP machines do, and whereas the newer Tbolt MM will do.)
(3) Perhaps the switcher device can handle the audio issue as well?
Please help!
Thanks greatly as I'm pretty flummoxed on what to buy here to resolve the issue.
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