As almost anyone who has ordered Apple products knows, Apple tends to under-promise and over-deliver when it comes to shipping dates. So when I ordered my 15″ MacBook Pro with Touch Bar at the beginning of November, the promised date was December 15. It arrived 10 days early.

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And when I ordered the 21″ LG 4K monitor a few days ago, the promised date was January 23, well over a month away. It arrived yesterday.

Setting up the LG was fun, and I quickly had the Mac’s built-in display and the LG’s acting as one large virtual display with the LG on top.

But I had a problem with the LG today. When I restarted the MacBook Pro, the monitor didn’t come on. This was annoying, as the LG has no on/off button or LED to indicate whether it’s on or off.

The system didn’t even recognize that it was there anymore. But the SSD that I had plugged into one of the monitor’s USB-C ports was recognized, so clearly the connection was good.

I called AppleCare, and the friendly tech who answered suggested a few things, things I should have done before calling, actually. Like unplugging the LG from the Mac.

They didn’t work.

(Interestingly, Apple tech support still hasn’t absorbed the fact that the new MacBook Pros don’t have a Power button or startup chime or an LED on the Power Adapter.)

Anyway, she put me on hold to check something, and I tried unplugging the LG again. When I plugged it back in, the LG was recognized.

She came back on and had me restart to make sure. Problem solved.

Except that now the Mac wasn’t recognizing the Seagate 4TB drive that I use for Media (iTunes, Photos, etc.) and that was plugged into the USB 3.0 hub.

A little more experimenting and I decided to plug both external drives back into the USB 3.0 hub. That seems to have fixed the problem. The Mac apparently gets a bit confused if I have a drive in the LG’s USB-C port and another in the USB 3.0 hub.

Moral: I think I need to convert to all USB-C ASAP to avoid more problems.