Turn your iMac into your
Mac mini's display

Two small apps that turn your iMac into an external monitor for your Mac mini or MacBook. Once both apps start at login, it reconnects on its own and feels close to a real wired display.

Same goal, different mechanism. Target Display Mode was Apple's older feature that used a Mini DisplayPort or Thunderbolt cable to turn one Mac's screen into a display for another — but Apple dropped support for it starting with the 5K Retina iMac in 2014. Every iMac from 2017 onward, and every Apple Silicon Mac, never had it at all. DispMini does the same job — turning an iMac into a display for another Mac — on machines Apple left out. You still run a cable between them (Thunderbolt 3/4 or USB4), but it carries a normal data link rather than the dedicated video signal Target Display Mode depended on, so it doesn't need that discontinued hardware path at all. Think of it as Target Display Mode's modern replacement for these machines.

A Mac mini has no screen, and a display worthy of it isn't cheap — meanwhile many people have an idle iMac whose software is outdated but whose screen is still excellent. Instead of buying another monitor, put that iMac back to work at no cost, and stop it from sitting idle.

No — provided you're on a cable. The picture is generated to match the receiver's real pixel dimensions, and both ends use hardware encode and decode, so even 27" 5K decodes without strain. Early builds did hit stutter, and the bottleneck turned out to be the link rather than either machine's performance; over a direct Thunderbolt or USB4 connection there's ample headroom, and the result is close to a real wired display. Over Wi-Fi, quality depends on whatever the network is doing at the time.

Yes. DispMini's picture lives on its own desktop Space on the iMac — swipe or use a keyboard shortcut to return to the iMac's own desktop. It's an ordinary app you can quit anytime, and it makes no persistent changes to the system.

The picture doesn't go through a server: the two Macs connect peer-to-peer. DispMini is designed for a direct cable, so the link isn't encrypted; Wi-Fi and other networks aren't what it's designed for. Update checks send limited device information. See the Privacy Policy.

One cable: a Thunderbolt 3/4 or USB4 cable running directly between the two Macs. If you don't already have one, it's the only thing to buy — and the one thing we'd tell you not to skip, because it's what determines whether the picture is rock-solid or not. Plug it in and you're done; there's no network setup, and the app prefers that link automatically. Be careful what you buy, though: a plain USB-C charging cable looks identical but carries no data. You can also connect over Wi-Fi by hand, but it's the fallback, not the design target — by default, the Sender only connects on its own when the cable is plugged in.

Because a display is a harder job than it sounds. Sending an entire 4K/5K screen dozens of times a second is nothing like streaming video: a video can buffer for a few seconds ahead, while a display has to land on screen the instant you move the mouse — there's nothing to buffer. Wi-Fi bandwidth is shared with every other device around you and swings with distance, walls, and interference. A Thunderbolt or USB4 cable is a private channel between the two machines with far more headroom than the picture needs, and nothing else competing for it. That's why the same software can feel like two different products depending on the link. The app tells you which one you're on: each paired receiver in the Sender's menu-bar panel carries a status dot — red means it's connected over Wi-Fi, yellow means it's on the cable, and green means it's on the cable and fully tuned. Aim for green.