My regular readers know that I am a serious Apple fan. One reason that I love Apple products is that, in most circumstances, they “just work”. I give a lot of presentations, and hook my laptop up to a lot of different projectors, and so far, things have almost always worked as expected. Very occasionally, my laptop will not automatically detect the projector, and there has always been an easy fix. Just click on the display properties icon in the menu bar, (or in the displays preference pane if you haven’t anchored the icon in your menu bar), click on “Detect Displays” and your computer should find and connect to the projector. In my case, it has worked 100% of the time.
My daughter is a high school history teacher, and this fall she treated herself to a new MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion. Yesterday she tried to hook up to the projector in her classroom, and it didn’t connect automatically. She went to the displays preference pane, and guess what? The “Detect Displays” button is gone! She called me for technical support. I haven’t upgraded to Mountain Lion (I always wait for Apple to release a couple of incremental updates before I upgrade!) so I had to turn to Google for some research assistance. Turns out that LOTS of people are having the same problem. Eventually, I found the answer. For some strange reason, Apple has hidden the “Detect Displays” button in Mountain Lion. It’s still there, you just have to hold down the “Option” key while in the preference pane, and it shows up! Back at school, my daughter hit correct keys, and bingo, her laptop connected to the projector.
This is not the first time that Apple has hidden an existing feature after an OS update. Apple fans may recall the vanishing “Library” folder after the Lion upgrade. All I can say, is “stop hiding things Apple!”