MST has been a dead letter since day 1 because nobody puts a more expensive monitor controller board in a monitor than it actually needs. 4K60 monitor? cool,

MST has been a dead letter since day 1 because nobody puts a more expensive monitor controller board in a monitor than it actually needs. 4K60 monitor? cool, it gets DP1.2. So MST means dropping to 1440p or 1080p resolution (splitting DP1.2 across two monitors). crappy dell office monitor? it gets DP1.1, so MST means dropping to 720p or 540p. absolutely no company in their right mind is going to haul off and put a DP1.4 in a bottom-shelf monitor or whatever, such that MST actually had extra resolution to play with. So the only places it matters are (a) stocktrader type people who want 8 monitors and don't care about visual quality/running non-native resolution, and (b) office situations and other places where the ability to run a single cable is more important than visual quality. so de-facto nobody has ever cared about MST, and docks fill this use-case much better. Thunderbolt/USB4 doesn't care about what monitor controller board is behind it. It just cares that you have one DP1.4 stream and the dock can allocate that into as many physical ports as the dock physically allows. Have the bandwidth but need more ports? Cool, just daisychain more docks/adapters. (and this does work on m1 pro/max btw - this guy for example did eventually find a dock that worked for him.) https://www.derekseaman.com/2021/11/my-journey-for-dual-displays-with-my-m1-pro-mac.html https://www.derekseaman.com/2021/11/my-journey-for-dual-disp... -- the big gotcha with M1 is really that the base M1 is actually a crossover chip between high-performance tablet/ultraportable laptop and so Apple doesn't want to waste the space for multiple PHYs that won't be used. So it gets 1x HDMI PHY (normally used for the internal screen, on tablets/laptops) and 1x DP PHY for an external monitor. The Pro/Max support 2 and 3 external displays respectively. I do agree this is a major limitation on the "just buy macbook air" approach, although you can use displaylink (video compression+USB+active adapter) or use an ultrawide monitor (it's a fast connection, you just only get 1 of them). In particular the 15" MBA really needed a "Pro" CPU option like the Mac Mini family, because that's actually a very nice ultrabook other than the single display, and I absolutely think the chassis is big enough to handle it for normal "interactive" use-cases (not bulk video processing/etc). And of course the 13" MBP doesn't get one either but lol fuck that thing anyway, let the touch bar/old-style chassis die already please