iPad Pro Anyone experience charge related display disconnects?

[DGGoingUphill]

I have the iPad M4 11” and am experience what is probably a software bug with external display. Wondering if anyone else experiences this.

I have an LG display, and it works fine in general with the iPad. The one issue I’m facing is that if I plug it in with less than a full charge (or under 80% on limited charging), it disconnects when the battery stops charging. Unplugging and replugging, and restarting the iPad doesn’t seem to get the display to reconnect, though I will sometimes get momentary reconnects right away. After a couple of minutes, the display comes back up. What I think is happening is that when the thunderbolt port stops charging from the display, it also cuts off the display as an accessory — the port is essentially shutdown to prevent more charging. After a while, it works it all out and can work with the display while refusing its option to charge. Since I can’t stop the display from charging the iPad, I can‘t really test the theory.

So, anyone else experiencing disconnects right when the device reaches full charge?

 

[janezblond]

I've experienced this with my M2 iPad Pro and now the M4 iPad Pro on literally every external display / charging combo I have used over the years. I've been lucky enough that this always resulted only in a short disconnect (1 second or so), but it is annoying since even then it has the same effect as unplugging the iPad, wreaking havoc on my Stage Manager layout.

 

[DGGoingUphill]

I've experienced this with my M2 iPad Pro and now the M4 iPad Pro on literally every external display / charging combo I have used over the years. I've been lucky enough that this always resulted only in a short disconnect (1 second or so), but it is annoying since even then it has the same effect as unplugging the iPad, wreaking havoc on my Stage Manager layout.

I think I narrowed down what causes the longer wait for a solid reconnect. It appears to depend on what I am doing, and what I suspect is that if I’m doing some more compute intensive, the battery drops a little and then quickly recharges, causing the issue to keep happening until there’s just a bit more juice in the battery to stop the cycle. If I also plug the Magic Keyboard into a power supply, it behaves just as you explained, which is probably because it is getting enough juice to not have a battery drop. My display is rated at 80 watts for charging, but the negotiation may be significantly lower in this case. Not sure if any of this is really what is happening, but it fits with my experimentation.

 

[Zuckerzurg]

My M4 iPad Pro constantly beeps when plugged into my 27“ LG Ultrafine monitor when the charge reaches 80%. It stopped when I turned the 80% charge option off in battery health settings. This seems to be a similar issue to those mentioned above. Not sure if this is a bug. Any ideas?

 

[aevan]

I have the iPad M4 11” and am experience what is probably a software bug with external display. Wondering if anyone else experiences this.

I have an LG display, and it works fine in general with the iPad. The one issue I’m facing is that if I plug it in with less than a full charge (or under 80% on limited charging), it disconnects when the battery stops charging. Unplugging and replugging, and restarting the iPad doesn’t seem to get the display to reconnect, though I will sometimes get momentary reconnects right away. After a couple of minutes, the display comes back up. What I think is happening is that when the thunderbolt port stops charging from the display, it also cuts off the display as an accessory — the port is essentially shutdown to prevent more charging. After a while, it works it all out and can work with the display while refusing its option to charge. Since I can’t stop the display from charging the iPad, I can‘t really test the theory.

So, anyone else experiencing disconnects right when the device reaches full charge?

Yes, happened to me. Connected to my LG monitor over the usb-c for display and charging. Worked great as my 13” M4 was charging, as soon as it hit the 80% limit (I have it turned on), display started disconnecting.

 

[DGGoingUphill]

Did some experimenting, and while the screen goes blank for a second when it reaches it’s full charge, it only get’s stuck in a loop when I have charge to 80% set. When it charges to 100%, it’s a momentary glitch that is more manageable.

 

[jayemery]

I found this thread after a lot of troubleshooting and looking for others with a similar problem. I have an M4 iPad Pro 11” (originally had the 13” and it exhibited the same issue) connected via USB-C to a BenQ PD3220U monitor. The display disconnects (display goes black) after what I thought was a random amount of time, and then the iPad keeps switching between charging/not charging. Some of the things I tried:

• Sometimes restarting the iPad would fix the issue for a short time, but often restarting didn’t help at all.
• I tried different cables and that didn’t have an impact.
• I thought perhaps there was some grounding issue with maybe an electrostatic discharge causing some signal interference so I moved my iPad/monitor to a different location in my house on a separate power source with nothing else connected, but the issue persisted.
• I tried using an external USB-C to HDMI adapter, which ultimately had the same issue, but slightly different symptoms; the screen went black eventually but the iPad didn’t do the charging connect/reconnect dance, and unplugging/replugging the HDMI cable from the adapter does in fact cause the display to come back on. This at least seems like somewhat of a workaround, and similar behaviour to what you mentioned in your original post.
• I installed iOS 18 beta 2 to see if there were any fixes to the OS that might have fixed this, but no luck there.

I’m still scratching my head and then remembered I recently turned on the “80% limit” feature to optimize battery health. I have the iPad plugged directly to the monitor via USB-C at this point, and saw that my battery was at exactly 80% when the disconnect happens. After the screen went black, I unplugged the cable and replugged to confirm that the display would not turn back on, which it did not. Then I unplugged the cable and left it unplugged, letting the iPad battery go down to 75%. I then plugged the USB-C cable back into the iPad and the display came on successfully. And sure enough, after the iPad hit 80% charge, the display went black.

After figuring this out, my next google search brought me to this thread, with you describing exactly the same issue. What the ever-loving-heck!! I guess at the end of the day it seems to be a compatibility issue between the iPad and some external displays. Though you have an LG display (presumably the 4k or 5k?) which is the “official“ Apple display during the time when Apple wasn’t making their own displays, so I would have thought that display should work. At least you can go back to 100% charge and have a momentary glitch - with the BenQ PD3220U it does the same thing at 80% and 100%.

 

[Cactus-LV]

Just registered to add to this thread that I’m having exactly the same issue. I have an LG ultrafine 5k. Does anyone know if the same happens with the Apple Studio Display? Is there another workaround then going back to 100%? even at 100% I have to restart it to work again - extremely annoying

 

[Snoggin]

I have this issue also with a Dell 5k monitor and MacBook pro.. If i keep it plugged into the Charger the problem goes away. But with just the display UsbC it disconnects all the time

 

[jayemery]

The BenQ PD3220U has two USB-C ports - one supports thunderbolt, and the other doesn’t. Connecting the iPad to the non-thunderbolt USB-C port (the one with just the charging icon) solves the issue; the display doesn’t shut off after the iPad is fully charged. It would seem that something about the thunderbolt connection is the culprit, so if your monitor has multiple USB-C ports, try them all!

My thanks to BenQ support for helping me out with this. I didn’t even know the second USB-C port could be used for display purposes because it only has the charging icon (whereas the other port has a picture of a display).

 

[Cactus-LV]

Thanks that is good to know. Unfortunately my LG ultrafine only supports video in on the main port.