What terminal command shows the type of display that I have on my MacBook Pro?

Solution 1:

ioreg -lw0 | grep \"EDID\" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

Depending on the string that comes up it will tell you the manufacturer of the display. It will not display in plain text.

Assuming you have a Retina display, a string with LP in it means it's an LG.

Solution 2:

Does the relevant info show up in system profiler?

If so, there's a command line: system_profiler. You can extract all kinds of information using the command line and piping it to cat, sed, awk, more, tail, etc.

Solution 3:

If you have a problem identifying the display with the command described above (as I did), you may use the following approach.

Issue the command:

ioreg -lw0 |grep EDID |grep 4c534e

If you see nothing, it means the display is NOT Samsung (4C534E in hex is "LSN"). If you see several lines including some letter-digit mixture (hex), your display IS Samsung.

You may alternatively try to search for "4C50" (which is "LP" in hex), it WILL produce some output for LG and will produce nothing for Samsung:

ioreg -lw0 |grep EDID |grep 4c50

Or, you may just use the command

ioreg -lw0 |grep EDID

and manually look for the above fragments (4c534e for Samsung and 4c50 for LG) in its output.

Rationale: at least in the terminal you can get booting with "Command" held (e.g. before activation of MacOS on a new device), the "xxd" tool is not available.