Michael Carrano

M1 Macbook with Dell S3221QS Monitor

Published by Michael Carrano on July 01, 2022

Recently, I was able to upgrade to an M1 Macbook Pro and I do not need to go into detail about how awesome this machine is. There are plenty of others who have already done detailed reviews. So I suggest you Google for the reviews if you still have any doubts.

I was super excited to get this laptop that I kept checking out the window for UPS to deliver it. When it finally arrived, I quickly unboxed it and swapped places with my old 2018 Macbook pro. Finally no more touch bar or terrible keyboard!

Unfortunately, not everything went smoothly. The first thing I noticed was that my monitor, Dell 32 Curved 4K UHD Monitor (S3221QS), would have the screen go off and on again every 30-60 seconds. This was super annoying so I started to Google for suggestions on fixing the issue.

Some of the “solutions” I came across like changing the refresh rate (System Preferences -> Display -> Select S3221QS monitor) did not work. Well, it did but that was only after setting it to be a 30Hz refresh rate, extremely slow. The other suggestion I saw was to unplug the power to the monitor for a few minutes, restart the computer, and then plug everything back together which still didn’t work for me.

One other slightly annoying thing was I was using a Display Port to USB-C cable for my monitor which meant I lost a USB-C port for other purposes like connecting one of the many Android devices I use for development.

What ultimately fixed both of my issues above was purchasing an Amazon Basics HDMI to HDMI cable for $7, shipped and arriving the next day.

Hope this helps anyone that has the same Dell monitor and issue I was facing when using the Display Port to USB-C cable.