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M2 MacBooks Still Officially Support Only a Single External Display
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No, it's not for me to settle, it's for me to chose the correct product for the correct job based on my needs. That's why I always state to do your research before buying any product and not buy for what it can be, but for what it is.
If you are paying >$500 extra to get an "upgraded" machine, just because a single feature is missing from the cheaper model that happens to do everything else you need, rather than buying from some other manufacturer, then you are absolutely settling for what Apple chooses to give you.
Which is why I do that if it comes to it. I have no qualms of using a Windows machine, I do so for work. Furthermore, I have been lucky enough to find what Apple offers at my time of upgrades to correctly fit my needs without buying upwards unnecessarily.
The base MacBook Pro can only run 1 external display. You need the M1 or M2 Pro or Max to drive more.
I won’t be surprised if Apple telemetry showed that only a minority of MBA users used external displays with their laptops, much less more than a single display.
Apple is usually pretty good at making tradeoffs in this sort of areas, and I suspect they are fine with this limitation as it will affect only a small percentage of their overall Mac user base.
Apple is usually pretty good at making tradeoffs in this sort of areas, and I suspect they are fine with this limitation as it will affect only a small percentage of their overall Mac user base.
Sounds like regardless of whichever manufacturer we go with, we are ultimately "settling" for one set of compromises over another.
At the end of the day, what is life, if not a bundle of compromises?
I don't say this often, but I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about here.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. People think display link "works" because the monitor turns on and shows a picture.
"Does exactly what the manufacturer intends, and exactly what the user expects" sounds like a pretty solid definition of "works" to me. YMMV I suppose.
Who knows if I'm even replying to the right comment now? It's on my DisplayLink'd screen. Better move it to the other one to make sure I'm not being deceived... yep it looks exactly the same.
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And you've tested a DisplayLink adaptor and found that it doesn't work properly? This is what I'm saying, you're making stuff up.
By the way, my office MBP doesn't display a picture on their USB-C monitors, and with any dual-DisplayPort dongle the Mac KP's, so instead I have to use two separate dongles. Turns out the particular GPU it has doesn't play nicely with those monitors for whatever reason. No DisplayLink involved. That's not a high bar.
DisplayLink is a hack and the results show. The fact that it's "good enough" for some people is not factor in any argument.
Is the limitation about monitor count or about the number of pixels the M2 can drive?
Could you, for example drive 2 external monitors at 1080p instead of 1 external at 4k-6k?
I love what I hear about Apple’s M processors but I guess I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around only supporting one external display since I’ve been doing multiple monitors since like windows 98 and Mac OS 8.x
Could you, for example drive 2 external monitors at 1080p instead of 1 external at 4k-6k?
I love what I hear about Apple’s M processors but I guess I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around only supporting one external display since I’ve been doing multiple monitors since like windows 98 and Mac OS 8.x
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HiDPI resolutions are arbitrarily being removed by Apple. My M1 Air is driving my 34" 5K LG ultrawide just fine at native 5880x2160, I just a lower HiDPI resolution of say, 1979px vertical so I get smoothing, everything isn't so tiny, I can use Mac's zoom function to get a closer look at things (never realized how much i use this) with images staying high res, and my designs render properly and smoothly in InDesign and Illustrator.
They should have given the option of upgrading it to the M1 Pro chip as a secondary CPU option.
That would be nice, but that would be a different model altogether. SOC changes everything.
LOL...of course...it is a refined M1, with minor improvements....whatever the M1 can and can't do, the same applies to the M2, only that the M2 is slightly faster in various metrics compared to its M1 brethren...