Oh my - an absolutely missed feature on the Pixel line up (and the OnePlus too) - being able to connect an adapter and have the display go on a monitor.
It's a small thing. But during COVID (and even before), I just loved being able to swap out from a laptop (like the Pixelbook) or a tablet (my Tab S4) and have those contents show up on my monitor. Just swap the device and the display changes and work on what you need to. I'd built up my desk to support that 'swappable brain' piece so that whatever I wanted to use, I just plug into a dock/adapter and use the same keyboard/mouse/monitor to get work done, and then those were easy to take away all I wanted.
But... Pixels have never really supported that adapter to plug in to the USB-C and then have HDMI plunk out the other end.
Phones... okay, not many phones do that (but waaaay back the Motorola RAZR had a dock - so way back I can't even find my review video). When tablets started having the ability (the first really being Samsung's DeX) it was a nice step towards something fun. Working on something on your tablet, and then just want a little more space to work on - plug it into the monitor. Samsung phones even got into the mix with DeX. Cool.
Then the Pixel phones not having it wasn't a big thing; but getting the Pixel Tablet, I was excited to try to plunk it into my set up. The mouse and keyboard worked. But not video out.
Odd.
Well, it's been a choice Google made from the start to disable that kind of output from the USB-C connector. Again, I'm not much of the actual electrical/standards requirement needed for it, so I won't even fathom a guess as to why or how...
But, it looks like the Pixel 8 may be different.
Check out this article from AndroidAuthority, which dives into the topic.
Essentially, the Pixel 8 hardware can support HDMI out, but they've disabled it, and there's some trickery-daring-doo for you to get it to work with an Android 14 Beta. That will get it to mirror, and there's some more work to be done to allow 'desktop mode'.
Now, promising - and maybe with the Pixel 9 and Android 15 we'll see it finally working (and maybe backwards compatible to the 8).
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