I’VE BEEN LUCKY enough to have very few major problems in my time using Macs —the occasional minor hiccup, sure, but nothing that required me to take significant steps to fix the issue. Regardless, when those annoyances occur, they can be a real pain, taking away from the pleasure, not to mention productivity, of using your machine. I can be stubborn at times, and I’ve learned to live with things not working quite how they should, but often they’re easy to put right. Afterwards, you can’t help looking back and thinking what a fool you were for ignoring that minor problem that plagued you for so long.
Case in point: a few weeks back, the external display connected to my MacBook suddenly started disconnected and reconnecting every few minutes. I could have easily just let my monitor do this all day long, but I refused to let this one beat me. Admittedly, given it was the screen I was looking at, it was kind of hard to ignore. Plus, I’m pretty sure it was responsible for the migraine I had at around the same time.
To remedy the issue, I tried jiggling the USB–C to DisplayPort connector around to see if this helped; moved it to another port on the display; and even swapped it for an identical cable. But nothing worked, and I got to the point of thinking that it might be the dock that could be faulty. It was then that I unplugged everything connected to the dock, put it all back together, and what do you know? Problem solved. At a guess, just turning the thing off and on again was probably what fixed it in the end. Gremlins in the machine, and all that.
If you’ve found yourself in a similar situation in the past, then this issue’s lead feature, Fix your Mac
