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Apple Engineers Allegedly Able to Use Vision Pro With Two Mac Displays

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Apple's new Vision Pro headset can serve as an external display for a Mac, letting you view and control your computer's screen in a visionOS window. The feature can currently be used with only a single Mac display, but analyst Ben Thompson today suggested that Apple has internally tested the ability to use multiple displays.

Apple-Vision-Pro-Mac-Virtual-Display.jpg

"I have heard through the grapevine that Vision Pro users at Apple headquarters can project two Mac screens," said Thompson, in his review of the headset.

Apple engineers have access to future visionOS versions, and feature flags that enable extra functionality, so this revelation is certainly believable. However, it's unclear if Apple plans to let the public use the feature with multiple displays.

For now, if your Mac has external displays connected to it, the Vision Pro only shows the main display that you have set in the Mac's System Settings app. While the Vision Pro is showing a Mac's display, the computer's built-in display and any external monitors that are connected to it appear black and cannot be used during that time.

The feature is compatible with any Mac running macOS Sonoma, but the maximum display resolution is limited to 3K for Intel-based Macs.

Article Link: Apple Engineers Allegedly Able to Use Vision Pro With Two Mac Displays
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/06/vision-pro-virtual-display-multiple-macs/
Last edited:
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I imagine over the next two or three years we will see a lot of improvement in the AVP, and this could be one of them. Not sure how I feel about it. Before having the AVP I thought having a Mac Window would be awesome. And it's okay, but not quite the same as a physical 27" monitor. Still have to focus on something for it to be sharp. I need to explore it more to figure out if thats a feature I like or not. So two windows? Maybe. What I am finding more useful than I expected was the actual native APV apps, once I paired them with a Magic Keyboard.
 
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Of course they tested it. I’m sure they tried to see how many at once, maybe even three or four and recorded their experience.
 
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Actually, once we get multiple displays, this becomes very compelling. I would need to see the actual quality of the displays for myself to see if this could replace real monitors, but I'm almost at the point at which I can't work without at least two screens.

I look forward to when I can travel with a headset and still have a 2+ display setup equivalent or better than my home office. It's probably a couple of years out, but one can dream. :)
 
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Totally not surprised here. Supposedly my M2 Macbook Air can only support 1 external monitor but I've seen many videos that allow multiple monitors with a dock and Displaylink software. Apple probably wanted to maintain certain performance standards and thus limited it to just 1 display for the Vision Pro. Once AVP gets M3 or later chips, this limitation may go away.
 
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contacos said:
Why not just install a 3rd party app that lets you do just that or is that another restriction for no reason by Apple? I am using „immersed“ on Quest 3
Click to expand...
As a retired former software engineer and based on things mentioned in the story, I would guess the reason is that Apple isn’t confident of the multi-monitor feature, whether it’s because of bugs or lack of system resources to allow for good performance. If it’s indeed running in Apple labs, it probably needs a ton of optimization.

Remember it’s still really early in that we can’t even arrange app icons on the “desktop” yet, a feature that will inevitably come to VisionOS. Or mouse support. There are probably a ton of features Apple simply hasn’t finished. Software managers would insist they have to ship something, so right now we have a very limited feature set. Time will tell. This is still very much a 1.0 (well, 1.0.2. Close enough). 1.0’s are rarely feature packed compared to what we get with a 2.0 or even a 1.5. I can mention quite a few bugs I’ve encountered that definitely need fixing before they get to new features.
 
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I believe people are usually wrong in why Apple doesn't allow things. It usually isn't that something can't be done, it is that it gives a less than ideal experience (lag/lower-quality) to the end-user and Apple doesn't want that so limits capabilities. It isn't greed or the lack of innovation.
 
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uecker87 said:
The second display is going to be locked behind a $1,000 paywall, duh. I am just kidding - I hope.
Click to expand...

Luckily not really Apple's style.

Ashwee said:
Windows/apps don't need to be constrained to a boxed display/window at all, especially with spatial computing. Let Mac apps and windows roam free like all other VisionPro apps. Either that or just allow resizable aspect ratios.
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Apple's VNC-based approach doesn't really have good support for either rootless mode (like Unity/Confluence in VMware and Parallels), or for RemoteApp like in RDP, where you share individual windows. It simply takes the framebuffer of an entire display and streams that. (It also has no notion of streaming vector graphics more efficiently.)

I believe NeXT used to have something more sophisticated (NXRemote? Unsure about the name), and of course Windows does with RDP, and Unix with X11, but Mac OS X never really did.

Given that they haven't added it so far, I'm not very optimistic that they will.

till said:
There's no obvious reason it can't be done, the bandwidth required is a small fraction of what WiFi 6 provides.
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Wi-Fi 6 does 9.6 Gbit/s under very ideal circumstances. Transmitting a 5K image requires (2560*2*1440*2)*3*60 = 2.5 GiB/s (or ~20 Gbit/s) at 60 Hz, not to mention twice that at 120 Hz ProMotion. Oh, and that's only with 8 bits per color; for 10 bpc, you need another 33% more.

At roughly 4K, which is what Apple seems to do, it goes down to ~1.4 GiB/s.

Of course, that does get reduced through compression. I'm not sure Apple applies lossy compression, which comes with its own warts, but if they don't, I wouldn't be so confident about "small fraction of what Wi-Fi 6 provides".

till said:
I'd guess they just couldn't figure out a nice UI in time to ship 1.0, and it'll be coming soon enough.
Click to expand...

That's probably part of it, sure. A one-display limit is fine for a 1.0.
 
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