(Accidentally posted this in the Alienware Desktop forum first - sorry. It belongs here instead!)


This monitor works beautifully as the primary monitor connected to my RTX 3080 Ti (via DisplayPort), and it also works as an external monitor for my Lenovo ThinkPad (via HDMI - no adapter; the only problem with this setup is that the ThinkPad doesn't seem to have the power to smoothly drive the monitor at native resolution, despite being glassy-smooth with slightly smaller monitors, but that's probably not the monitor's fault). However, I cannot for the life of me get it working as an external monitor with my Surface Pro 7 or my MacBook Air. Each computer sees the monitor and *believes* it's outputting a signal, but the Dell monitor just goes to sleep and displays nothing. (Refresh rate is in range, so that's not the issue.)

In both cases, I'm using a brand-new Anker USB-C-to-HDMI adapter which works fine carrying a signal to other HDMI monitors, and the HDMI cable is the same one that works with the ThinkPad, so I don't think either is the culprit. I've updated the Surface Pro 7 with the most recent Dell drivers for this monitor; I can't do so with the MacBook Air since Dell doesn't provide any OS X drivers. Regardless, both computers see the monitor and think they're successfully extending to it, but the Dell just sits there, asleep.

What are my options here? I don't want to return this monitor, which is otherwise fantastic, but it's not acceptable for it be unusable as an external monitor for hardware that sees my other high-resolution monitors without any issue at all. I see other folks ran into this issue and reported that it was fixed with a driver update, but 1) I did that on my Surface Pro with no change, and 2) I can't do that on my MacBook anyway since Dell doesn't provide OS X drivers.