Trick Macbook air into running dual external monitors?

[jopo90]

Hello,

I've tested daisy chaining, different monitors, all the different connector types available to me and can't get the macbook air to run dual external monitors. From what I've found it seems that it doesn't support MST and won't support 2 monitors.

It's a 2018 model but not the latest with finger print reader and I have a startech thunderbolt 2 dock.
The closest to getting what I want was having the two displays in daisy chain but the second mirrored the first.

As a last ditch effort I'm asking here if anyone know if its possible to trick it in to thinking it's connected to 1 screen with 1920*2160 resolution and output it that way to both monitors? My hopes aren't that high that this is possible as I haven't found anything but since I can get it to power a 4k monitor it can deal with the amount of pixels just fine.

So anyone know of a way to do this or should I cut my losses?

 

[Boyd01]

It's a 2018 model but not the latest with finger print reader

If you don't have the fingerprint sensor and retina screen, it's not a 2018 MacBook Air. Perhaps it's a 2017 MBA?

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook-air-core-i5-1.8-13-2017-specs.html

I have a 2013 MBA, so not sure what may be different about whatever model you have. But on the older ones, this device should allow you to connect two monitors and treat it as one virtual screen in a manner like your describe.

https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/dh2go/digital_se/

Otherwise, I think you can plug one monitor into your dock, then also connect another device (such as a disk drive) into the other thunderbolt port on the dock. You could then plug a second monitor into the pass through port on the disk drive. As I understand it, each thunderbolt device can only drive one monitor. So using an additional device in the chain allows you to use a second monitor.

Again, this is how it works with the HD5000 on my MBA, not sure if this has been changed with the newer graphics chips.

 

[macnmac]

i ran 2 monitors just fine

 

[ruslan120]

You could invest in an external graphics card and plug as many monitors into it as you want. Example: MBPro supports three monitors by default. Here’s a demo of it running 4: