For mobility tech purveyors purchasers of late-model laptops, such as myself, with my Gold 2020 Apple MacBook Air, the world of portable Thunderbolt 3 USB-C portable monitor additions is a vast online playground. During the recent Amazon Prime Day, internet retailers, in addition to Amazon, themselves, went all-out in a celebratory manner, for the consumer, as it turns out, in what ended up being a massive e-commerce blow-out event that suited the tastes of all manners of shopping fanatics, when store front retailers had been bought out, looted, and ransacked, due to COVID-19 and activist rioting, around town.
I wanted a monitor that matched the size of my computer, and I wanted a similar pixel frame size, so that I could fit the device in to my backpack. There’s many variables involved in portable monitor Shopping, such as weight, device width behind the screen itself, color profile, connectivity features, etc. Throughout much browsing, for days on end, leading up to deciding upon this monitor, the Corkea 13.3 inch 2560 x 1440 2K IPS monitor, with mini HDMI and USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 connectivity on Amazon, for $159.99 ended up being the winning suitor, with me as a much-satisfied customer.
The Apple MacBook Air (early 2020) features 2 Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, with support for its native display resolution of 2560 x 1600, in addition to up to 5K on external monitor(s) is for real: big-time display workspace extendable on the cheap, and it’s not much like the days of working with desktop computer monitors - big, bulky, and demanding upon live-work space real estate. Here, I set up my workspace for the night in a new spot in my room, in the corner, just to have an element of novelty new-ness to my working environment.
Everything is modular, ephemeral, and ad hoc, in this mobility-centric lifestyle workspace assertion. The monitor itself is lightweight, even compared to the MacBook Air, itself. In a backpack, even one pound adds a lot of weight and muscular exertion to an outing. I made sure to compare the device weights on the external monitors I had to choose from, and I chose Amazon, over other internet retailers, such as Walmart.com and Google Shopping, for the simple matter of their prolific and daunting arrays of offerings and features.
I’m willing to give newcomers and unknown brand names a chance, in my tech device procurements, on account of the fact that it’s a golden age for technology and manufacturing, and for that competition is fierce, whereas a resourceful manufacturer who presents themselves within the competitive ecology of internet retail space has probably stood the tests of enterprise startup infancy, and proven themselves for resilience well enough to make way for advertising and fulfillment space within Amazon’s internet retail ecology.
I purchased this monitor, in addition to the fact of its compatibility with my MacBook Air, for my IoT edge computing projects, such as the Google Coral Dev Board, which I’m finding to be a much-riddling and arcane experience in bootstrapping the device. Should I port over to Raspberry Pi? I’m somewhat at odds with that notion, given that I feel that it’s simply a matter of getting the right documentation in front of me, paired with the right resources. In any case, I wanted the HDMI port compatibility that this monitor offers, with its mini-HDMI port, and the shipping box included the ported regular-to-mini HDMI cable with it, in addition to what seems like a valid Thunderbolt 3 cable, for power, a 5V x 3A AC power adapter, a 1-to-2 port USB-C to USB-3 female adaptors OTG cable, and a USB-3 to USB-C cable, for plenty of attachments.
The monitor acts, somewhat, as a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C hub, for the computer, in that it has 2 USB-C OTG ports, for connecting other peripherals, such as storage, or keyboard and mouse. The monitor, once it’s plugged in, and suitably powered on, is capable of externally powering the laptop, through the laptop’s daisy chaining in connectivity to the powered monitor. Alternately, the laptop can power the monitor, drawing energy from the computer, if needed, in a pinch. The monitor draws up to 45 watts of power, I believe, as it’s built with Thunderbolt 3 USB-C capable ports, which the cable and port protocol is known, in the realm of laptop device hubs, batteries, and power adaptors, for example, to pull up to 100 watts of electricity, for all of the devices connected. From dealing with voltage and amperage of smaller devices, adaptors, and external battery devices frequently, that much wattage is a mind-boggling amount of energy to command use of, in a device on-site setup environment, yet the MacBook Air 2020 laptop computer does it in fine form, with the Magenet Corkea 2K 13.3 inch IPS monitor coming through in brilliant resolution and clarity.
In fact, the Corkea external monitor is capable of delivering much brighter colors and tones than the native Apple MacBook Air monitor. Here’s the Corkea external monitor in HDR mode, and side-by-side with the MacBook Air monitor. This feature disables the user-defined brightness, contrast, and color leveling options of the monitor.
I’m supposing that this is as bright as it can get. For that matter, the MacBook Air is set to its brightest levels, although, to be fair, the macOS Accessibility options, in System Preferences, allows for single color “Color Filters” to be applied over the display’s output, which can significantly alter the brightness and tonal warmth of the monitor’s output. All this being the case, I commonly do my on-device development and productivity work at night, and in the dark, so I don’t turn the brightness all the way up, anyhow.
For the price that it’s been offered at on Amazon, I’d venture to say that this is one of the best upgrades for the MacBook Air, as a perhaps little-known and oft-overlooked feature to take advantage of, given the MacBook Air’s native hardware capabilities - in this case, the graphics card GPU is the Intel Iris Plus Graphics card with 1536 MB of VRAM. That means that the GPU can muster the worth of about a third of an entire DVD-R 720P video, from back in optical device drive days - all at once.
For most every day and typical uses, having an extra external monitor is a significantly handy feature, and it allows the user experience profile to be alternate from the standard on-device navigation and input profile of having everything in front of the user, which helps out, when it comes to lounging and sprawling out with the tech mobility lifestyle setup on the floor, for the sake of a uber-customizable, comfortably suitable posture and body aesthetic set of options.
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