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Apple Has Finally Solved One of the MacBook Air's Biggest Limitations
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I'm running an M1 Max Studio with a Plugable dock with 3 monitors connected which works because of the DisplayLink software and it runs great. That said, I am using productivity apps like Outlook, Excel, Word, Adobe Acrobat, browsers, and a few other apps and not doing video editing or rendering or anything that would expose the DisplayLink limitations.
I have read that a Thunderbolt Dock - think CalDigit TS3+ or TS4 or OWC docks can support 2 monitors from their TB/USB-C ports via USB-C to DisplayPort or USB-C to HDMI cables and that you can run 2 monitors using a single cable dock connection from the Mac to the dock, but in my case to get a 3rd monitor working I would absolutely need to connect the third monitor directly as those docs don't support 3 monitors.
Again, my Plugable solution is cheaper and works well.
I would argue that across everyone. Not that many use 3 displays.
I didn't say anything of that, but if a product doesn't have a feature you need, you must do the following:
1) Keep the product you have
2) Learn to live without the feature
3) Buy another product which has the feature you need
If that product is $1000 more expensive that's the price you have to pay to get what you need.
I can' t see how you overcome this problem in any other way.
Pretty certain Apple read the customer feedback hence the M3 compromise and actual solution seen on M4.
not saying Apple is not doing this kind of things (e.g. blocking eGPUs with TB1/TB2 Macs while they're perfectly capable)
but this was not the case, as it was proved that it phsically lacked the needed circuits on the chip
still crazy to think that Intel MBA was capable of that 14 years ago
Life is all about trade offs, and perhaps Apple understands this better than anyone else.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the majority of MacBook Air users don’t need a monitor, or were fine with a single one. Nobody is saying that users don’t need more than one screen, but given the engineering limitations which Apple likely faced at the start, Apple made the decision to prioritise features which they believed would matter to their user base more.
That’s Apple products in a nutshell. Not about having the most specs or doing the most, but about the sufficiently differentiated experience afforded by Apple’s control over hardware and software.
Likewise, because of their prices, Apple will never have the majority market share for their products, but they will have the profits, which again, is the result of having aggregated the best customers in the world, plus being able to offer a unique experience that users are willing to pay a premium for.
I said it before, and I will say it again. People need to start trying to explain Apple’s successes more, not explain it away.
I'm looking forward to the day when the MacBook Air can also sport a Pro chip, like the Mac mini, and they change the name of the MacBook Pro to the MacBook Studio with Max and Ultra options. Then they come out with a Mac Pro that has an Extreme chip, which is slotted above the Ultra with like a terabyte of RAM.
My 14" MBP M3 Max with 64GB RAM is already basically my dream device. My only complaint is I wish it was a little thinner and lighter, especially since I have a beautiful leather case from Andar on it. I guess that's my fault, but if my device were thinner and lighter, it would be less of an issue. I'd also prefer OLED or something similar with true black levels and no notch or at least a small hole punch. Otherwise everything is essentially perfect.
My 14" MBP M3 Max with 64GB RAM is already basically my dream device. My only complaint is I wish it was a little thinner and lighter, especially since I have a beautiful leather case from Andar on it. I guess that's my fault, but if my device were thinner and lighter, it would be less of an issue. I'd also prefer OLED or something similar with true black levels and no notch or at least a small hole punch. Otherwise everything is essentially perfect.
Please can you provide some specifics or links so I can check.
EDIT: I did some digging myself too. I see it was enabled in Sonoma. I couldn't find pre/post GPU stats, at a glance. Speculation, but nothing solid from inside or outside Apple as to whether this was simply a 1/0 or something more complicated like optimization.
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I wonder if this lid closed thing (in order to use two external monitors) on the MacBook Air M3 is a hard- or software limitation. If the latter is the case, Apple could fix this with a firmware update, for example.
I have a M1 MBA with a Dell D6000 DisplayLink dock. It works fine for productivity apps, but getting it working is often glitchy, ie when plugging in the cable it often takes multiple plug/unplugs, restarting computer or DisplayLink software, etc before the monitors and peripherals are recognized. A non-software solution would be ideal.
That being said, it seems possible with a Thunderbolt dock - but it's yet another purchase for basic functionality.
It's a hardware limitation, there's only two display processing units, one of which can be muxed to internal panel or external port, the other is always on external port.
M4 has three.
Yeah, sadly. The first m1 generation was not muxable, so it was fixed to internal panel only, from what I gather on Asahi linux development, it might or might not have been muxable on m2, so it's not entirely clear there if it could have been unlocked. And m3 is officially muxable, and then m4 has three units - as noted being needed to drive the dual layer oled panel on the ipad pros whilst still allowing external display too.