Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Touchbar Macbook Pro 13" drives LG Ultrafine 5K & 4K simultaneously

swrobel

swrobel

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 26, 2014
163
457
In case anyone else out there had the same crazy idea that I did and wanted to hook up one 27" 5k LG Ultrafine and one 24" 4k LG Ultrafine to a 2016 Touchbar MBP 13", the amazing answer is, it works! I went to an Apple store and there was a 13" tbMBP hooked up to a 24" Ultrafine and a Mac Mini hooked up to a 5k Ultrafine next to it, so I conned an employee into taking a $50 Belkin Thunderbolt 3 cable out of the box (she first tried a USB-C cable and of course it didn't work ... ugh) and plugged it into one of the ports on the tbMBP, and hallelujah, it worked! I was able to drag windows amongst all 3 screens and didn't notice any graphical glitches of any sort.

Accidentally posted to the Macbook forum first here
 
  • Like
Reactions: Sanpete
Wow - Apple Store employees are much more helpful to you than I've experienced. Now granted, since there isn't an Apple Store in my country I have very little experience with the staff, but when I went to one in London, I couldn't convince them to give me sudo access to change a plist file for unlocking more resolution options and hi-DPI scaling for the Mac Pro that was connected to a 4k screen literally without any scaling whatsoever, so everything was tiny. I even told them that hi-dpi scaling was the default in the latest beta of OS X at the time (which it was), but they weren't having it - And just to be clear, I wasn't actually being a **** about it even though it might sound it now - I didn't push it very hard at all
 
According to the Apple support page for 4K/5K displays, this should not work. Maybe the 5K was not running at full resolution? Would be great if someone else has a chance to reproduce this test/setup and check more thoroughly if this actually works. The lack of 4K+5K support was/is basically the only thing holding me back from getting a 13 tbMBP.
 
the future said:
According to the Apple support page for 4K/5K displays, this should not work. Maybe the 5K was not running at full resolution? Would be great if someone else has a chance to reproduce this test/setup and check more thoroughly if this actually works. The lack of 4K+5K support was/is basically the only thing holding me back from getting a 13 tbMBP.
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell, it doesn't explicitly say it *won't* work, it just doesn't explicitly say it *will* work. Do you have any links to back up what you're saying?
 
I wonder how this would do playing 4K videos and dragging them between monitors. Also, what would the frame rates be?
 
There have been several red herrings from macOS regarding the LG 5K monitor. Under the right conditions, you can get macOS to claim that it is displaying a 5K resolution while using a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter, which should not be possible.

What is probably happening here is that the LG 5K is displaying a 4K image - despite what System Preferences may imply - and thus in reality only two external 4K screens are being driven, which is supported as per the specs.
 
Sorry to resurrect this - has anyone tried this? Does it actually work for full resolution 5K plus 4K? It'd be interesting to see the capability of 2018 13-inch.
 
  • Like
Reactions: JTToft
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back