I can't believe that the company that has some of the best hardware and software engineers in the world, still can't figure out display management in macOS.
Plainly, it's a nightmare. It was a nightmare in Monterey, and after doing a complete wipe and fresh install of Ventura in my Mac Studio, I can definitely say it's still a nightmare. You connect a second monitor and if you're lucky, it doesn't make it main right away. But just one reboot, and you can be assured that the second monitor will suddenly be turned into the main one.
So you have to put things back in place. Then you connect a third monitor using the HDMI output, because it goes to your TV set. So now it thinks that because you connected a TV set, you want to make it main monitor. So now you have to waste more time changing things around, and making the monitor in front of me the main monitor for a second time.
Then you reboot with all three, and now the machine decided to make the second monitor, which I have on the left, the main one. So now I have to keep wasting time. And it's not just setting the main monitor over and over, it's that you main set it as main, but the apps stay on the monitor they were at, so you have to drag all the window, or go to the Window menu and do the Move to the monitor you have set as main, and this is not one time, it's over and over and over.
Sometimes it decides to swap things around for no reason and assign the arrangement to whatever the hell it randomly decides. It's like an evil child residing inside the machine switching circuits around. It's maddening. I've been putting up with this since I got this Mac in June. I also have a 2021 MacBook Pro, and it has the same problem.
How is it possible that a $5,000 Mac that is in everything else, a miracle of engineering, a machine that outperforms almost every other machine in existence that is not a large and noisy workstation, can have far worse display management than Windows? Because I use Windows too, not as much, but I’ve used both Macs and PCs for the last 25 years, and to this day, even on a fairly new Dell laptop with Windows 10, display management is nowhere near this horrible. In Windows, when I set a display to main, it stays that way. And I don’t mean just on that Dell, every single Windows computer I’ve had or used for work, at worst would swap monitors the first time I connected an additional one, but once I put them back, they stayed that way.
Why is that so hard for Apple’s engineers to program macOS to recognize each monitor and save the assignment it had, and the position it had? Even though I’m using two identical Samsung monitors, they both have different serial numbers, and something called UID, which can be seen from the system report app when clicking on each of them back and forth.
And SwitchresX helps up to a certain point, but when macOS decides to swap monitors any way it wants, it puts all the open apps in what now considers the main monitor, and if you had made a custom display set in SwitchresX with a shortcut, when you apply it, the monitors change, but all the apps stay in the monitor that macOS set as main.
And SwtichresX doesn’t work sometimes, because display management is so chaotic in macOS that sometimes it changes the numbers of the two displays that are the same brand and model. So SwitchresX thinks that display #1 and #2 are what they were when you created the display set, but the OS decided to swap those numbers, so now when you apply the display set, suddenly your main display is on the side where the second one should be.
It’s like a crazy, sadistic, bratty child inside the machine changing the circuit paths around to drive people crazy.
And it’s even more infuriating when you have been sending feedback about this for months, and a new major version of the OS is released, and it’s the same nightmare.
Even worse, you can’t even post anything in the Apple forums because the moderators are children that take offense if you post anything even remotely critical of Apple, even if you don’t use any foul language. After being an Apple customer for two decades, having spent probably close to $20,000 in several Apple computers and other devices, and I’m not rich in the least, so it’s infuriating to see such an arrogant attitude from that company.
This is not something that is going to send me running to the Windows/PC world. I’m not an Apple fanboy, I use Apple products because I really like them, and they make my life better. But this attitude is the reason why many people call Apple a cult, and I wish the company had a more humble attitude and treated its customers with more respect, given that these machines are a lot more expensive than PCs.
Plainly, it's a nightmare. It was a nightmare in Monterey, and after doing a complete wipe and fresh install of Ventura in my Mac Studio, I can definitely say it's still a nightmare. You connect a second monitor and if you're lucky, it doesn't make it main right away. But just one reboot, and you can be assured that the second monitor will suddenly be turned into the main one.
So you have to put things back in place. Then you connect a third monitor using the HDMI output, because it goes to your TV set. So now it thinks that because you connected a TV set, you want to make it main monitor. So now you have to waste more time changing things around, and making the monitor in front of me the main monitor for a second time.
Then you reboot with all three, and now the machine decided to make the second monitor, which I have on the left, the main one. So now I have to keep wasting time. And it's not just setting the main monitor over and over, it's that you main set it as main, but the apps stay on the monitor they were at, so you have to drag all the window, or go to the Window menu and do the Move to the monitor you have set as main, and this is not one time, it's over and over and over.
Sometimes it decides to swap things around for no reason and assign the arrangement to whatever the hell it randomly decides. It's like an evil child residing inside the machine switching circuits around. It's maddening. I've been putting up with this since I got this Mac in June. I also have a 2021 MacBook Pro, and it has the same problem.
How is it possible that a $5,000 Mac that is in everything else, a miracle of engineering, a machine that outperforms almost every other machine in existence that is not a large and noisy workstation, can have far worse display management than Windows? Because I use Windows too, not as much, but I’ve used both Macs and PCs for the last 25 years, and to this day, even on a fairly new Dell laptop with Windows 10, display management is nowhere near this horrible. In Windows, when I set a display to main, it stays that way. And I don’t mean just on that Dell, every single Windows computer I’ve had or used for work, at worst would swap monitors the first time I connected an additional one, but once I put them back, they stayed that way.
Why is that so hard for Apple’s engineers to program macOS to recognize each monitor and save the assignment it had, and the position it had? Even though I’m using two identical Samsung monitors, they both have different serial numbers, and something called UID, which can be seen from the system report app when clicking on each of them back and forth.
And SwitchresX helps up to a certain point, but when macOS decides to swap monitors any way it wants, it puts all the open apps in what now considers the main monitor, and if you had made a custom display set in SwitchresX with a shortcut, when you apply it, the monitors change, but all the apps stay in the monitor that macOS set as main.
And SwtichresX doesn’t work sometimes, because display management is so chaotic in macOS that sometimes it changes the numbers of the two displays that are the same brand and model. So SwitchresX thinks that display #1 and #2 are what they were when you created the display set, but the OS decided to swap those numbers, so now when you apply the display set, suddenly your main display is on the side where the second one should be.
It’s like a crazy, sadistic, bratty child inside the machine changing the circuit paths around to drive people crazy.
And it’s even more infuriating when you have been sending feedback about this for months, and a new major version of the OS is released, and it’s the same nightmare.
Even worse, you can’t even post anything in the Apple forums because the moderators are children that take offense if you post anything even remotely critical of Apple, even if you don’t use any foul language. After being an Apple customer for two decades, having spent probably close to $20,000 in several Apple computers and other devices, and I’m not rich in the least, so it’s infuriating to see such an arrogant attitude from that company.
This is not something that is going to send me running to the Windows/PC world. I’m not an Apple fanboy, I use Apple products because I really like them, and they make my life better. But this attitude is the reason why many people call Apple a cult, and I wish the company had a more humble attitude and treated its customers with more respect, given that these machines are a lot more expensive than PCs.
