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External screens are not the exception in our office, or any other office I've ever seen. The hardware vendors is there to handle a certain number of pixels at

External screens are not the exception in our office, or any other office I've ever seen. The hardware vendors is there to handle a certain number of pixels at a certain refresh rate. If it wasn't, then they couldn't support even one external 6k@60hz monitor. The problem is that Apple is making an arbitrary decision here that they don't care what resolution of external monitor you have, but whatever it is, you can have only one.

olliej 4y ago
They are the exception in almost every office that I have ever worked in, but you are also not paying attention to what I just said. Apple's display controllers are huge, I'm guessing a non-zero part of that is supporting 6k60, which they felt was necessary. Given that constraint, they chose not to make the machine presumably quite a bit more expensive to support what is a niche use case. Saying it's an arbitrary decision is nonsense, they made a trade off, that doesn't work for your particular use case. Presumably market research would have fed into the decision making process, and that market research presumably said something like "dual monitor use with (apple?) laptops is negligible" or maybe something more nuanced "dual monitor use with something below high/max cpu count (apple?) laptops is negligible". Engineering is about tradeoffs, it's not arbitrary - if you look at the twitter thread the display controller is bigger than multiple cpus, adding an additional one would presumably mean fewer CPUs increasing the price/cpu for the much more common people for whom the second display controller is useless, so they now get a slower machine for the same price; or it increases the price of the machine by needing a larger die with an additional display controller, that still isn't being used, and so remains useless. I would assume a larger die+additional display controller would also use more power even though it's not being used, so you'd get a battery life reduction as well. Again, it's not arbitrary, it's trade offs that you don't agree with. (I tried to see what the max display resolution for high end pc laptop gpus, and just found recommended resolutions which seemed unhelpful)
- bradknowles 4y ago
  It's not more expensive. They just want to force people who want to use two external monitors to buy a more expensive machine. I say this as a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a closed-door/by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the original Mac, before the official announcement during the Super Bowl in January of 1984. Five minutes of playing with the only two applications that existed at the time (MacWrite and MacPaint, because the Calculator had not been written yet), and I was convinced that this was the future of all modern computing. I became a Mac owner in the 512k "FatMac" days, and have owned many, many Macs and other Apple devices ever since. I also did a six month contract for Apple Retail Software Engineering, the group that develops and supports all the software used to train and otherwise assist all the employees in all the stores. I have literally been there and done that, for decades. Apple clearly wants to make a distinction here, because otherwise there would be no justification for the "pro" name in "MacBook Pro". If the baseline MacBook could do two external monitors, and cost hundreds of dollars less, then that would sorely hurt their profit margins. Apple makes money by selling you stuff at a significantly higher price for each step up than it actually costs them to make. They make much more profit on the more expensive items, and that's what they want to upsell you on. They've been doing that for decades. I have literally put my money where my mouth is. Thousands and thousands of dollars of it. I know what they're doing and why. And yet, I still buy those more expensive machines, because they're the ones that give me the features I want. But that doesn't mean I have to be happy about what they're doing and all the extra thousands of dollars of money I've had to shell out over the years.

olliej 4y ago

They are the exception in almost every office that I have ever worked in, but you are also not paying attention to what I just said. Apple's display controllers are huge, I'm guessing a non-zero part of that is supporting 6k60, which they felt was necessary. Given that constraint, they chose not to make the machine presumably quite a bit more expensive to support what is a niche use case. Saying it's an arbitrary decision is nonsense, they made a trade off, that doesn't work for your particular use case. Presumably market research would have fed into the decision making process, and that market research presumably said something like "dual monitor use with (apple?) laptops is negligible" or maybe something more nuanced "dual monitor use with something below high/max cpu count (apple?) laptops is negligible". Engineering is about tradeoffs, it's not arbitrary - if you look at the twitter thread the display controller is bigger than multiple cpus, adding an additional one would presumably mean fewer CPUs increasing the price/cpu for the much more common people for whom the second display controller is useless, so they now get a slower machine for the same price; or it increases the price of the machine by needing a larger die with an additional display controller, that still isn't being used, and so remains useless. I would assume a larger die+additional display controller would also use more power even though it's not being used, so you'd get a battery life reduction as well. Again, it's not arbitrary, it's trade offs that you don't agree with. (I tried to see what the max display resolution for high end pc laptop gpus, and just found recommended resolutions which seemed unhelpful)

bradknowles 4y ago
It's not more expensive. They just want to force people who want to use two external monitors to buy a more expensive machine. I say this as a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a closed-door/by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the original Mac, before the official announcement during the Super Bowl in January of 1984. Five minutes of playing with the only two applications that existed at the time (MacWrite and MacPaint, because the Calculator had not been written yet), and I was convinced that this was the future of all modern computing. I became a Mac owner in the 512k "FatMac" days, and have owned many, many Macs and other Apple devices ever since. I also did a six month contract for Apple Retail Software Engineering, the group that develops and supports all the software used to train and otherwise assist all the employees in all the stores. I have literally been there and done that, for decades. Apple clearly wants to make a distinction here, because otherwise there would be no justification for the "pro" name in "MacBook Pro". If the baseline MacBook could do two external monitors, and cost hundreds of dollars less, then that would sorely hurt their profit margins. Apple makes money by selling you stuff at a significantly higher price for each step up than it actually costs them to make. They make much more profit on the more expensive items, and that's what they want to upsell you on. They've been doing that for decades. I have literally put my money where my mouth is. Thousands and thousands of dollars of it. I know what they're doing and why. And yet, I still buy those more expensive machines, because they're the ones that give me the features I want. But that doesn't mean I have to be happy about what they're doing and all the extra thousands of dollars of money I've had to shell out over the years.