Since I got my aluminum Macbook back in October, I’ve been waiting for the dual-link DVI adapter, so that I connect the laptop to my desktop monitors at home and at work. Normally, this’d be a $5 part, or $40 Apple-branded, but There Were Complications: Apple introduced a new port, the ’mini display port,’ which apparently requires circuitry to drive dual-DVI; it’s not just a matter of plug shape.

So the adapter is a scandalous $99, and I finally just got mine today. It’s huge:

For scale, here’s the DVI-D (digital only, annoyingly, not -I) connector and USB passthru:

There’s a lot of complaining on the Apple page about these, and my fingers are crossed that they’ll work for me. They’re bulky, expensive and require USB power to run == lame. However, so far they’re driving my Dells at home and at work OK; I had one glitch (snow) that hasn’t repeated. We shall see. It’s all worth it for this:

That shows my desktop on the big monitor. The leeetle window in the middle shows the relative size of the display on the laptop! Pixels are everything, my friends. I did OK coding and such for November and December on the small screen, but now I have my clicky keyboards and big displays back, and life is much better.

Update 2/12/09 Yep, flaky as heck. Every now and then the screen flickers, and some of the time it goes into glitch mode, requiring sleep/wakeup to reset. I am unhappy and unimpressed, with no alternative.