3 ms·
I sometimes run an ultrawide (3440x1440) off my M1 Air. It works... ok. MacOS doesn't output more than 50hz, and every hour or so the display will flicker off a
by 015a 5y ago
I sometimes run an ultrawide (3440x1440) off my M1 Air. It works... ok. MacOS doesn't output more than 50hz, and every hour or so the display will flicker off and on. I haven't decided if its an issue with the M1, or an issue with the hub I'm using, but its not a big enough concern for me to justify investigating much further.
I personally feel that 21:9 ultrawides aren't quite as good as dual 16:9 displays for productivity. But they're fine. My biggest complaint is that most people would reasonable center their monitor on the desk. If you run 2x16:9, you can have one centered, and one off to the side, which allows you to mostly look straight forward and have a natural primary/secondary setup.
At 21:9, this setup is weirder; either you size your primary window (browser, code editor, etc) to ~16:9, left-or-right-align it, then you have to slightly crane your neck, or you center-align it and you're left with slivers of screen real-estate to the left-and-right. Or you can shrink the primary center window, approaching maybe a max of 7:9 for all three windows, which is maybe rarely useful for some applications. Or you can maximize the window, and in most applications you get tons of unused space. Or you can physically offset the monitor on your desk, which looks weird. There's just no solution that works "great" especially given these displays are oftentimes at a small premium over 2x16:9.
I think something like the Samsung Odyssey CRG9 would be much higher productivity in ultrawide, with its 32:9 aspect ratio. There, you could run a ~16:9 centered primary window, and still have ~8:9 canvases to the left and right, which is enough horizontal estate to comfortably have a terminal, Spotify, browser, etc. Its also relatively affordable (~$1100), though given you can find solid 1440p 27" monitors for $200-$300, you're effectively cross-shopping 3x16:9 displays. Still definitely a "luxury" buy. Its ultimately unclear to me that it would be better, and not just "differently similar".
- turtlebits 5y agoI think it's your dock. I have an LG 3440x1440 (and a Dell at work) that works fine over USB-C directly to my M1 Air.
- vocoda 5y agoI tested my 3440x1440 monitor with M1 Air. I found that fonts are rendered without anti aliasing and looked not good at all. Do you have similar issues?
- paulmd 5y agoI have 3440x1440 and it works fine - I run 100 hz on my work MBP. Which is Intel, granted, but 3440x1440 is strictly less than 4k, and we don’t see an epidemic of people noticing that their 4k monitor is running at 30 hz on their M1 MBPs. 50 hz happens to be the limit of hdmi 1.4b (at 3440x1440), it sounds like somewhere in your chain you have something that is running at legacy speeds. Could be your dock, could be your monitor, could be an active adapter cable. I’d start by making sure you’re running DisplayPort and not HDMI. HDMI is more or less a “legacy” port these days, as far as workstation usage is concerned. And unlike DP there is no embedded HDMI support in USB-C Alt Mode so any sort of USB-C to HDMI adapter needs an active converter - which may be your hdmi 1.4 bottleneck. (note that the "passive" HDMI mode that full-size displayports offer - aka DP++ - is an optional part of the spec. It's so widely implemented on full-size ports that most people don't realize it's optional, but embedded DisplayPort implementations like eDP or USB-C Alt Mode, Thunderbolt, etc don't implement this feature.)
- hatware 5y agoAnker sells a relatively cheap dongle that will do 100Hz ultrawide over HDMI.