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I'm connecting a Macbook Pro to a 1600x1200 display via Apple's USB-C to VGA converter. By default it selects an appalling 800x600 resolution and the system settings only let me push this up to 1280x1024. The only tweak I could find is to enable "Show all resolutions" which does offer more options but nothing beyond 1400x1050, which looks horribly blurry.

The adapter claims to support resolutions up to 1920x1080, which is slightly more pixels than 1600x1200, so I can't see a good reason why it would refuse to use the native 1600x1200.

How can I convince the machine (running Ventura 13.2.1) to Do The Right Thing?

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  • These Apple adapters are usually good at VGA. You might want to try an active VGA adapter instead. The Apple adapter is passive; it reorders the signals. An active adapter recreates the signal completely
    – Allan
    Apr 6 at 3:33
  • Of course, I could try and use another adapter (tho Apple's adapter is also active, so it sounds like I'd have to go and try adapters randomly until I find one that happens to be "sufficiently active"), but that doesn't really answer my question :-(
    – Stefan
    Apr 7 at 15:28
  • Where did you find that the adapter is active? The support page makes no mention of this
    – Allan
    Apr 7 at 16:08
  • AFAIK it''s simply impossible to turn the serial digital signals of USB-C to the analog parallel signals of VGA without active logic. Maybe your notion of "active" is to "render the USB-C (display port, presumably) signal to an internal framebuffer which is then output via VGA", but that'd be an unusually restrictive notion of "active".
    – Stefan
    Apr 7 at 17:33
  • The display signal on that Type C port is DisplayPort. DP was designed to replace VGA so while it is quite easy to convert from DP to VGA, the higher resolutions and frequencies could only benefit from an active adapter. It should work with a passive adapter, but you will likely see better results with an active one.
    – Allan
    Apr 7 at 18:08

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