MacBookPro TB 2016 w/3 displays

[Jobeo]

I have a beautiful 3 monitor layout with my 2013 iMac in the center and two Thunderbolt displays on each side (propped up with 1" books underneath). The 2 Thunderbolt displays cannot daisy chain using the built-in cords because they are just a little bit too short but both connected to the thunderbolt ports on the iMac work fine.

So as to the title of this post, I have a work supplied MacBook Pro TB 2016 (16GB RAM+Radeon 450 GPU).
My 2013 iMac will become a secondary display using TDM (Targeted Display Mode). I can also hook up one Thunderbolt display and daisy chain the other. What I CANNOT do is have all three displays at once.

MBP->TBDisplay->TBDisplay: this works just fine but then attach the 2013 iMac and TDM does not respond. If I remove one of the TBDisplays , the iMac will become a secondary display again using TDM.

MBP->iMac->TBDisplay: Daisy chaining a TBDisplay from the iMac works in a funny way. The TBDisplay becomes a second monitor to the iMac. When the MBP is hooked-up and the iMac placed into TDM the TBDisplay becomes the primary display for the iMac and the iMac becomes a second display for the MBP.

At this point I cannot find a way to have all 3 monitors working with the MBP. is this a design limitation of the MBP 2016 (I thought it could do 3 4k displays)? is it a limitation of TB2? Would a 2018 or a 2019 model be able to drive all 3 monitors? (I'd love to push for a 2019 model w/32gb ram for the VMs i run)

 

[jhsfosho]

I thought a TB port only supports 2 monitors. I.e. you'd need to use a second port to drive the third monitor

 

[Jobeo]

I thought a TB port only supports 2 monitors. I.e. you'd need to use a second port to drive the third monitor

hmmm... already using two "apple usb-c tb3 to tb2" converters (at $50/ea) to drive these; one to the iMac, the other to one TBDisplay which is then daisy-chained to the other. I could try a 3rd and drive all displays separately (yuk).

 

[Jobeo]

in case this information is useful to anyone:

I was able to drive all 3 displays from the tbMBP using separate Apple USB-C tb3->tb2 adapters with Apple 2m TB2>TB2 cables (in a total of three of these things). I've noticed the iMac display disconnects and re-connects, which makes the same thing happen on the two TB displays. This happens once or twice during a usage period. I do lock and sleep the displays (as it happens automatically) as I do other things so I cannot say how many hours of continuous use vs. display "bounce" is happening. Running iStat menu so I see temps and mem/cpu usage but not really seeing any correlations. For all I know it could be the iMac's TDM having issues but this never happened when it was connected w/o the TD Displays in the mix.

I run 3 crappy 1080p displays from it at work using apple usb-c to HDMI converters (what a coincidence, I use 3 to get 3 displays ) without problems like the above. though TB3 could handle this many 4k displays so 2550x1440 should be less load but who knows. Not sure if a newer model with newer GPU and/or 2019 model with more RAM would work any better.

Oh well, I have a great setup to develop, run VMs and containers, and have a bunch of iTerm2/shells running.