5 ms·

We have many staff with MBP + dual external displays and it's always been the least reliable aspect of the platform. From reading between the lines in the unusu

We have many staff with MBP + dual external displays and it's always been the least reliable aspect of the platform. From reading between the lines in the unusually arcane history of support docs on the topic, I've surmised their stance can be summed up as "it might work!" Which of course runs counter to the Apple It Just Works ideal, so they can never come out and admit as such. They've gone to great lengths to squeeze impressive performance out of their stingy graphics hardware choices at the OS level, but there's not much you can do to massage the numbers when adding up pixels, I guess.

wlesieutre 9y ago
For what it's worth (anecdote incoming) I use a touchbar MBP with a Dell UP2414Q, which is driven using multi-stream transport. Effectively its panel is presented to the system as two separate displayport streams running daisy-chained over a single port. Once I found the right cable, everything worked fine. (The first cable was advertised with DP1.2 and MST support, but it would only operate in the legacy mode that dropped down to 30 Hz). God forbid you try to use this with Windows though. Sometimes half of the screen cuts out, sometimes one side of it shifts by a couple hundred pixels (and wraps the right edge of the image around to a stripe down the middle of the screen), and god knows what other problems that I can't even remember. This was with a GTX 900 series GPU which is definitely "supported." I used to have it hooked up to my Windows desktop since that's the fast computer with more storage and RAM, so it should be great for stuff like Lightroom. But since the screen doesn't work reliably, I moved that back to my MBP. A friend with the same screen had identical issues on Windows and a similar solution. It's now on his wife's desk for her to plug her Macbook into. Display signaling has gotten a lot more complicated than DVI/VGA were, and the reliability problems that have cropped up from that are present across the industry.
- nerpderp83 9y ago
  Do you have a link for this cable? I am always interested in foisting esoteric firmware and poorly implemented protocol bugs upon myself.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    They're USB-C to DisplayPort cables, so these will mainly be useful to people with the 2016-2017 MBP. MST worked: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N11K30W/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N11K30W/ MST did not work: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XFG1YKT/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XFG1YKT/ I can't say for sure if it's the cable's fault or if it's the particular combination of cable/computer/screen that has some obscure compatibility problem. Makes me miss the days when a cable was a cable and we could tell people "Just buy any HDMI cable, no need to spend $60 on it."
valuearb 9y ago
I use my MBP with 4 different external monitors (all different types, Apple, Samsung, Acer and Dell), two at a time, and it almost always works. Once in a blue moon something glitchy happens, not sure if that's reasonable performance or extraordinary performance given I haven't seen any other platform do as well.

wlesieutre 9y ago

For what it's worth (anecdote incoming) I use a touchbar MBP with a Dell UP2414Q, which is driven using multi-stream transport. Effectively its panel is presented to the system as two separate displayport streams running daisy-chained over a single port. Once I found the right cable, everything worked fine. (The first cable was advertised with DP1.2 and MST support, but it would only operate in the legacy mode that dropped down to 30 Hz). God forbid you try to use this with Windows though. Sometimes half of the screen cuts out, sometimes one side of it shifts by a couple hundred pixels (and wraps the right edge of the image around to a stripe down the middle of the screen), and god knows what other problems that I can't even remember. This was with a GTX 900 series GPU which is definitely "supported." I used to have it hooked up to my Windows desktop since that's the fast computer with more storage and RAM, so it should be great for stuff like Lightroom. But since the screen doesn't work reliably, I moved that back to my MBP. A friend with the same screen had identical issues on Windows and a similar solution. It's now on his wife's desk for her to plug her Macbook into. Display signaling has gotten a lot more complicated than DVI/VGA were, and the reliability problems that have cropped up from that are present across the industry.

nerpderp83 9y ago
Do you have a link for this cable? I am always interested in foisting esoteric firmware and poorly implemented protocol bugs upon myself.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  They're USB-C to DisplayPort cables, so these will mainly be useful to people with the 2016-2017 MBP. MST worked: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N11K30W/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N11K30W/ MST did not work: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XFG1YKT/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XFG1YKT/ I can't say for sure if it's the cable's fault or if it's the particular combination of cable/computer/screen that has some obscure compatibility problem. Makes me miss the days when a cable was a cable and we could tell people "Just buy any HDMI cable, no need to spend $60 on it."

valuearb 9y ago

I use my MBP with 4 different external monitors (all different types, Apple, Samsung, Acer and Dell), two at a time, and it almost always works. Once in a blue moon something glitchy happens, not sure if that's reasonable performance or extraordinary performance given I haven't seen any other platform do as well.