14 ms·

And yet the air can’t support more than one monitor. I know Apple is a small company with only a few engineers so it must have been too hard. Sarcasm obviously

And yet the air can’t support more than one monitor. I know Apple is a small company with only a few engineers so it must have been too hard. Sarcasm obviously. As an Apple enthusiast it’s so annoying how they sniff farts.

sneak 3y ago
The Air is not the computer for people who use a lot of external monitors. 99.9%+ of MBAir users will never connect even one external monitor. They make a small MacBook Pro that is suited for that task.
- Detrytus 3y ago
  And yet it's a dick move from Apple to artificially limit number of external screens supported.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is. It is Apple’s best selling computer by quite a bit. They sell metric assloads of the $999 base model each fall when school starts. IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price.
    - user_7832 3y ago
      > Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is. > IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price. It is possible for your comment to be correct while the poster above is also correct. The M chips are amazing, but let's not pretend that Apple doesn't knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions. "But that would make it more expensive." Yes it would... by pennies. It is a bit ridiculous to sell a phone as expensive as the current iphones and limit them to USB 2.
      - sneak 3y ago
        Generally speaking, people don’t use the port on an iPhone for anything other than charging. The fact that it supports USB v-anything is mostly unnecessary cost. If you are thinking in any way whatsoever about the non-wireless data transfer speeds on your phone, you are not the market or user it was designed for. Same goes for external monitors on an MBA.
        user_7832 3y ago
        I agree that USB isn't commonly used but that's kinda the point - it doesn't hurt apple much to do it (and they're not saving anything remotely significant), but they still do it to force the few who do want to use fast USBs. A more common example where nearly everyone would notice would be the abysmal ram in their phones until very recently.
      - lukas099 3y ago
        > knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions. I'm skeptical. A ton of money is dumped into optimizing everything and then they just throw it down the drain? That would drive more people to the competition than to higher-priced Macs.
        user_7832 3y ago
        I meant that bit in general and not specifically for the mac, but for eg they sold iPads with 32gb storage as recently as 2020 iirc. Even now the base level macs have much less ram and storage than similarly priced windows counterparts. I think part of it is just so they can say "macbooks start at $xx!". There are more examples I can't think of right now.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Come off it. - the 14" M3 is $1600, but limited to a single external display, and actually only has two TB ports, it's just sad - the M3 Pro is limited to two external displays, despite an entry price of $2000 $3199 is the baseline to be able to use 3 external displays (although at that price you can plug up to 4).
    - MikusR 3y ago
      the 2000 Euro M3 Macbook pro also supports only one external display and is the same size and weight as the ones that support more.
  - _ph_ 3y ago
    They are not artificially limiting the number of external screens. To support more screens, they would have to reserve die area for an additional controller. That could mean a gpu less or something. This is about engineering tradeoffs.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Considering the M3 has 55% more transistors than the M1, I'm sure they could have found some room for a third display controller, or a more capable one (one with MST support for instance), or just a more flexible one. They're selling a $1600 machine which can't drive two external displays, it's sad. Intel's HD Graphics have been doing better since 2012 and they're trash.
      - nomel 3y ago
        > considering the M3 has 55% more transistors than the M1 And that's why everyone loves node shrinks. You can stuff more transistors for the same cost.
      - willseth 3y ago
        It’s a business decision. You don’t think Apple knows the demand for multiple external displays? If they thought it would sell more Macs, they would do it.
        masklinn 3y ago
        > It’s a business decision. That doesn't make it less frustrating. > If they thought it would sell more Macs, they would do it. It's short term thinking, it generates bad feeling of nickel and diming and unnecessary upsells: on M3 you need to pay $2000 to be able to use two external displays, and $3200 for 3, even if you have no need for the rest of the processing power. Not only that but they managed to create more range confusion with the expensive but gimped entry-level 14".
        willseth 3y ago
- cylinder714 3y ago
  If you're referring to the 13-inch model, that's been discontinued.
  - sneak 3y ago
    No, the 14. The Air is 13, and the “normal” MBP is now 16. The 14 MBP is not onerously large if you are one of the people who want an Air-sized computer with lots of IO. It would be annoying if you had to get a 16” laptop to be able to hook up to multiple external displays. I love my 16” MBP but my Air is the one that goes everywhere in my handbag.
    - mananaysiempre 3y ago
      The plain M3 version of the MBP doesn’t support more than one external display either[1]. [1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ (scroll down to “Display Support”)
- kylec 3y ago
  You need to spend a minimum of $2000 though, the new $1600 MacBook Pro also only supports one external display.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Yeah, the new MacBook Pro with a non Pro or Max chip is essentially an Air with a couple extra ports. I don't think they should have released it.
    - upget_tiding 3y ago
      It's better than the 13" MacBook Pro with touchbar that it replaced.
    - kylec 3y ago
      The screen is substantially better, and the addition of the ports will be useful for a lot of people. Honestly, the base Apple Silicon chips are more than fast enough for most people, if they supported more than one external display I would have no problem recommending the M3 MacBook Pro with a RAM upgrade.
- mmcnl 3y ago
  It's not a computer for people who don't use external monitors because it's not supported. Connecting more than 1 display is not a "pro" task, it's pretty normal especially for professional purposes. Also, the base MBP 14" doesn't support more than 1 display either.
user_7832 3y ago
While some engineering compromises I can understand, most appear to simply be anti-consumer/cash-grabs. Need more than 8gb ram? Hope you've got sufficient money. Want a high refresh rate screen present in cheap android phones? Sorry not for our base models.
- datpiff 3y ago
  > Want a high refresh rate screen present in cheap android phones? What is this for? Games? I avoided this to save money the last time I bought a phone. I honestly can't think of use case where a phone display needs to update higher than 60 Hz
  - user_7832 3y ago
    High refresh rates aren't just for games, they make the entire interface smoother. Things like frame rate or latency are quality of life things that you don't need, but once you upgrade, the difference becomes clear. Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. Hopefully someone else has a better analogy.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      More importantly VFR is not useful for just high refresh rates. I would argue that for most people on a phone it's the least useful part of the thing. Instead VFR allows saving battery by slowing down the refresh rates, down to as low as 1FPS for static or high latency content. That's part of why always on display is only available on the 15 Pro: at 60Hz it's a battery killer. > Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. So... functionally useless.
      - user_7832 3y ago
        > So... functionally useless. (Disclaimer, I haven't driven a sports car but I have driven cars between "nice" and "struggles to reach the speed limit") While it might appear to be very similar, having a sports car that you're capable of driving well/defensively can literally be a life saver. There was this video from a few years back on reddit of this guy in a 911. Vehicle in front suddenly stops/crashes, he needs to rapidly change lanes at highway speeds. The little 911 unsurprisingly handled it excellently. A slow/heavy car would've very likely spun out and crashed. Having more power if you don't need it doesn't hurt (if you're trained well). Less can hurt.
euazOn 3y ago
It sucks but at least DisplayLink works well enough. Driving 4 monitors this way with my M1 Mac Air with no issues.
- Ographer 3y ago
  Can you name or link any specific hardware or software you're using? Last time I looked into how to run 2 monitors on my M1 Air I gave up after seeing $400 docks that seemed to have performance issues for some people.
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    I have this for my m1 pro: https://a.co/d/gD5q8G3 https://a.co/d/gD5q8G3 It uses the 6950 DisplayLink chip, which can do 4K@60Hz. It's 90 dollars and drives 2 screens. Software is less good. I had to enable Rosetta2 to get the pkg to install. Then you have to boot to recovery mode to allow signed 3rd party drivers. And you get a creepy notice that someone is watching your screen, which is how the display driver works. Performance is pretty good, just a bit laggy on mouse movement.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      Is that because the screen generation is software based? I noticed that when using display link and couldn’t bare the input lag or worse the compression from moving a window too rapidly. Switched to a monitor with thunderbolt output and my coworkers thought I was being a diva.
      - Ographer 3y ago
        My understand is that yes, the external displays are both rendered by the CPU and so there are lower frame rates and frames dropped which is a concern of mine since I am pushing this computer to its limits with some applications I run. I've heard that for casual use it isn't too noticeable. Unfortunately I don't think the M1 Air supports TB daisy chaining unless you're ok with mirrored displays. I still can't decide if I want to ask my job for a new computer, a new dock, or new displays lol.
wubrr 3y ago
I mean, the support for even one monitor is by far worse than windows or linux IMO. - Monitor randomly resets/readjusts for no apparent reason. Like multiple times every hour. - Windows disappear, become inaccessible after moving between monitors, even though it still open and active according to doc/task list. - Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window? Like, you can do it by un-maximizing the window in question, moving the other window over and then re-maximizing the window again. But why is this nonsense needed? What problem could this restriction possibly be solving? - Lots of other monitor/workspace related problems (quick google will show dozens related problems without any obvious solutions or explanations for the completely nonsensical behaviour). I really don't understand how people can say macos has good and consist overall UI? I mean, yeah - it's consistently buggy and un-intuitive: - Doc constantly breaks/becomes inaccessible. This is a known problem for at least 5+ years - the solution is to manually kill and restart the process??? - Text cursor/caret randomly disappears when editing text, so you can't see where the cursor is, and you can't fix this unless you restart the app (happens to pretty much all apps). - Was working with unicode characters recently, now whenever I press command+s to save something, it gives me a visual unicode character selector popup, with no apparent way to stop/cancel this behaviour from the popup itself. - Bad defaults in terms of keypress repeat times and rate. No apparent way to change this from settings - need to run commands and re-login to test new behaviour. Just an overall crap OS and UI imo.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I’ve been using macOS in a multimonitor setup for years without much issue. A good bit of it boils down to macOS expecting monitors to be well-behaved, e.g. each having unique EDIDs (many don’t, instead sharing one across all units of a particular model) and initializing in a timely fashion. > Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window? Because it’s fullscreened, not maximized. macOS doesn’t really have window maximization in the traditional sense out of the box, you need a utility like Magnet or Moom for that. That fullscreen mode was introduced in 10.7 Lion and a lot of long time mac users have found it silly from day one. Personally I never use it. > Text cursor/caret randomly disappears when editing text, so you can't see where the cursor is, and you can't fix this unless you restart the app (happens to pretty much all apps). I’ve seen this, but only in Chromium browsers and Electron apps. Seems like it might be a Blink bug. Regarding other OSes, multimonitor on Linux is mostly fine (so long as you’re using Wayland; X11 is another matter especially if you’re doing something slightly uncommon like using two GPUs, in which case xorg.conf mucking will likely be necessary). By far the most frustration I’ve had with multimonitor is in Windows, which is generally weak there. IIRC it only recently gained the ability to set per-display wallpaper; before you had to glue wallpapers together into a single image that spanned across them, which is silly.
wkat4242 3y ago
It's not hard. The pro can do it. It's simply market positioning to make you spend more.
alberth 3y ago
Only 1-monitor support seems like a market segmentation decision, not a lack of capability. (Much like how the iPhone Pro has faster USB-C data transfer speeds vs base iPhone)
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Give me a "pro" which is thinner than and without a fan. or Give me an "air" with two external monitors and 64GB ram. The pros are clunky and heavy. I'm on an air, and will stay there for a long time because if this
  - abakker 3y ago
    Aren't the pros and the airs very close to the same weight? the 15" air is 3.3 lbs and the MacBook 14" with the m3 is 3.4lbs. The heaviest 16" with the m3Max is 4.4.
    - nwienert 3y ago
      15 air significantly heavier than 13
- joshstrange 3y ago
  I agree but the iPhone is a bad example. They used the previous year chip in the non-pro phone (or a binned version IIRC) which didn’t have the USB3 speed support. I guess we will see if next year’s base iPhone has the faster data speed support or not.
- josu 3y ago
  Yeah, you can actually use these dongles to connect more monitors. https://m1displays.com/ https://m1displays.com/
  - mmcnl 3y ago
    A DisplayLink is not a real dock. It's basically compressing the display output using the CPU and decompressing it using an external GPU in a box to output it to more displays. The performance is terrible, you get weird artifacts, there's lag, you can't use it for gaming, etc.
delfinom 3y ago
It's intentional. Apple is going down the path of SKUs to segment their price points. It may also be they have chips that have bad display controllers and they are using this as one way of offloading those chips with the bad controllers lasered off.
hartator 3y ago
I have the Air, it does support its own monitor + a 6k monitor.
quitit 3y ago
The answer is pretty straight forward: it has no fan and limited ram. It supports a 6K screen in addition to the built-in screen. It's reasonable to say that if you need 3 screens to get your job done, then that is not representative of the market for apple's lowest-end laptop.
- exabrial 3y ago
  Dude my old galaxy phone from yesterday could drive a 4k display
  - quitit 3y ago
    Filing this under irrelevant. My dude.
- mmcnl 3y ago
  The basic office setup in most companies is two screens with a dock (lid closed). That's a super common way of working. RAM and fan has nothing to do with it, the cheapest low-end Windows laptops can do this with ease, it doesn't stress the RAM, CPU or GPU at all.
  - quitit 3y ago
    > RAM and fan has nothing to do with it, the cheapest low-end Windows laptops can do this with ease, it doesn't stress the RAM, CPU or GPU at all. - M-series uses unified memory, the ram does in fact matter. - Heat also matters, because throttling. The Air uses a fanless, heatsink system. - Whatever cheapest low-end PC you’re imagining is not fanless and not running an external 6k monitor at 60Hz. - None of those systems are optimised to maintain performance while possessing an 18 hour battery life. None of those even have an 18 hour battery life. The Air serves a clear market segment. It’s their entry level laptop, the problem isn’t the laptop.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  My super old hp elitebook from 2015 was a piece of shit and yet had to trouble driving two external monitors This is arbitrary market segmentation. I need two external monitors mostly because I share the same single cable to my dock with work and because macOS is so stupid about monitors it randomly connects to one or the other, not both. So I have to manually power off the wrong monitor each time and turn it on for work. Really annoying.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
charlie0 3y ago
If you can afford multiple monitors, surely you can afford a slightly more expensive laptop.

sneak 3y ago

The Air is not the computer for people who use a lot of external monitors. 99.9%+ of MBAir users will never connect even one external monitor. They make a small MacBook Pro that is suited for that task.

Detrytus 3y ago
And yet it's a dick move from Apple to artificially limit number of external screens supported.
- sneak 3y ago
  Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is. It is Apple’s best selling computer by quite a bit. They sell metric assloads of the $999 base model each fall when school starts. IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    > Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is. > IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price. It is possible for your comment to be correct while the poster above is also correct. The M chips are amazing, but let's not pretend that Apple doesn't knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions. "But that would make it more expensive." Yes it would... by pennies. It is a bit ridiculous to sell a phone as expensive as the current iphones and limit them to USB 2.
    - sneak 3y ago
      Generally speaking, people don’t use the port on an iPhone for anything other than charging. The fact that it supports USB v-anything is mostly unnecessary cost. If you are thinking in any way whatsoever about the non-wireless data transfer speeds on your phone, you are not the market or user it was designed for. Same goes for external monitors on an MBA.
      - user_7832 3y ago
        I agree that USB isn't commonly used but that's kinda the point - it doesn't hurt apple much to do it (and they're not saving anything remotely significant), but they still do it to force the few who do want to use fast USBs. A more common example where nearly everyone would notice would be the abysmal ram in their phones until very recently.
    - lukas099 3y ago
      > knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions. I'm skeptical. A ton of money is dumped into optimizing everything and then they just throw it down the drain? That would drive more people to the competition than to higher-priced Macs.
      - user_7832 3y ago
        I meant that bit in general and not specifically for the mac, but for eg they sold iPads with 32gb storage as recently as 2020 iirc. Even now the base level macs have much less ram and storage than similarly priced windows counterparts. I think part of it is just so they can say "macbooks start at $xx!". There are more examples I can't think of right now.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Come off it. - the 14" M3 is $1600, but limited to a single external display, and actually only has two TB ports, it's just sad - the M3 Pro is limited to two external displays, despite an entry price of $2000 $3199 is the baseline to be able to use 3 external displays (although at that price you can plug up to 4).
  - MikusR 3y ago
    the 2000 Euro M3 Macbook pro also supports only one external display and is the same size and weight as the ones that support more.
- _ph_ 3y ago
  They are not artificially limiting the number of external screens. To support more screens, they would have to reserve die area for an additional controller. That could mean a gpu less or something. This is about engineering tradeoffs.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Considering the M3 has 55% more transistors than the M1, I'm sure they could have found some room for a third display controller, or a more capable one (one with MST support for instance), or just a more flexible one. They're selling a $1600 machine which can't drive two external displays, it's sad. Intel's HD Graphics have been doing better since 2012 and they're trash.
    - nomel 3y ago
      > considering the M3 has 55% more transistors than the M1 And that's why everyone loves node shrinks. You can stuff more transistors for the same cost.
    - willseth 3y ago
      It’s a business decision. You don’t think Apple knows the demand for multiple external displays? If they thought it would sell more Macs, they would do it.
      - masklinn 3y ago
        > It’s a business decision. That doesn't make it less frustrating. > If they thought it would sell more Macs, they would do it. It's short term thinking, it generates bad feeling of nickel and diming and unnecessary upsells: on M3 you need to pay $2000 to be able to use two external displays, and $3200 for 3, even if you have no need for the rest of the processing power. Not only that but they managed to create more range confusion with the expensive but gimped entry-level 14".
        willseth 3y ago
cylinder714 3y ago
If you're referring to the 13-inch model, that's been discontinued.
- sneak 3y ago
  No, the 14. The Air is 13, and the “normal” MBP is now 16. The 14 MBP is not onerously large if you are one of the people who want an Air-sized computer with lots of IO. It would be annoying if you had to get a 16” laptop to be able to hook up to multiple external displays. I love my 16” MBP but my Air is the one that goes everywhere in my handbag.
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    The plain M3 version of the MBP doesn’t support more than one external display either[1]. [1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ (scroll down to “Display Support”)
kylec 3y ago
You need to spend a minimum of $2000 though, the new $1600 MacBook Pro also only supports one external display.
- sroussey 3y ago
  Yeah, the new MacBook Pro with a non Pro or Max chip is essentially an Air with a couple extra ports. I don't think they should have released it.
  - upget_tiding 3y ago
    It's better than the 13" MacBook Pro with touchbar that it replaced.
  - kylec 3y ago
    The screen is substantially better, and the addition of the ports will be useful for a lot of people. Honestly, the base Apple Silicon chips are more than fast enough for most people, if they supported more than one external display I would have no problem recommending the M3 MacBook Pro with a RAM upgrade.
mmcnl 3y ago
It's not a computer for people who don't use external monitors because it's not supported. Connecting more than 1 display is not a "pro" task, it's pretty normal especially for professional purposes. Also, the base MBP 14" doesn't support more than 1 display either.

user_7832 3y ago

While some engineering compromises I can understand, most appear to simply be anti-consumer/cash-grabs. Need more than 8gb ram? Hope you've got sufficient money. Want a high refresh rate screen present in cheap android phones? Sorry not for our base models.

datpiff 3y ago
> Want a high refresh rate screen present in cheap android phones? What is this for? Games? I avoided this to save money the last time I bought a phone. I honestly can't think of use case where a phone display needs to update higher than 60 Hz
- user_7832 3y ago
  High refresh rates aren't just for games, they make the entire interface smoother. Things like frame rate or latency are quality of life things that you don't need, but once you upgrade, the difference becomes clear. Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. Hopefully someone else has a better analogy.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    More importantly VFR is not useful for just high refresh rates. I would argue that for most people on a phone it's the least useful part of the thing. Instead VFR allows saving battery by slowing down the refresh rates, down to as low as 1FPS for static or high latency content. That's part of why always on display is only available on the 15 Pro: at 60Hz it's a battery killer. > Sort of like going from a slowly accelerating station wagon to a Porsche/sports car even when (capped by the speed limit) if you've experienced that. So... functionally useless.
    - user_7832 3y ago
      > So... functionally useless. (Disclaimer, I haven't driven a sports car but I have driven cars between "nice" and "struggles to reach the speed limit") While it might appear to be very similar, having a sports car that you're capable of driving well/defensively can literally be a life saver. There was this video from a few years back on reddit of this guy in a 911. Vehicle in front suddenly stops/crashes, he needs to rapidly change lanes at highway speeds. The little 911 unsurprisingly handled it excellently. A slow/heavy car would've very likely spun out and crashed. Having more power if you don't need it doesn't hurt (if you're trained well). Less can hurt.

euazOn 3y ago

It sucks but at least DisplayLink works well enough. Driving 4 monitors this way with my M1 Mac Air with no issues.

Ographer 3y ago
Can you name or link any specific hardware or software you're using? Last time I looked into how to run 2 monitors on my M1 Air I gave up after seeing $400 docks that seemed to have performance issues for some people.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  I have this for my m1 pro: https://a.co/d/gD5q8G3 https://a.co/d/gD5q8G3 It uses the 6950 DisplayLink chip, which can do 4K@60Hz. It's 90 dollars and drives 2 screens. Software is less good. I had to enable Rosetta2 to get the pkg to install. Then you have to boot to recovery mode to allow signed 3rd party drivers. And you get a creepy notice that someone is watching your screen, which is how the display driver works. Performance is pretty good, just a bit laggy on mouse movement.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    Is that because the screen generation is software based? I noticed that when using display link and couldn’t bare the input lag or worse the compression from moving a window too rapidly. Switched to a monitor with thunderbolt output and my coworkers thought I was being a diva.
    - Ographer 3y ago
      My understand is that yes, the external displays are both rendered by the CPU and so there are lower frame rates and frames dropped which is a concern of mine since I am pushing this computer to its limits with some applications I run. I've heard that for casual use it isn't too noticeable. Unfortunately I don't think the M1 Air supports TB daisy chaining unless you're ok with mirrored displays. I still can't decide if I want to ask my job for a new computer, a new dock, or new displays lol.

wubrr 3y ago

I mean, the support for even one monitor is by far worse than windows or linux IMO. - Monitor randomly resets/readjusts for no apparent reason. Like multiple times every hour. - Windows disappear, become inaccessible after moving between monitors, even though it still open and active according to doc/task list. - Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window? Like, you can do it by un-maximizing the window in question, moving the other window over and then re-maximizing the window again. But why is this nonsense needed? What problem could this restriction possibly be solving? - Lots of other monitor/workspace related problems (quick google will show dozens related problems without any obvious solutions or explanations for the completely nonsensical behaviour). I really don't understand how people can say macos has good and consist overall UI? I mean, yeah - it's consistently buggy and un-intuitive: - Doc constantly breaks/becomes inaccessible. This is a known problem for at least 5+ years - the solution is to manually kill and restart the process??? - Text cursor/caret randomly disappears when editing text, so you can't see where the cursor is, and you can't fix this unless you restart the app (happens to pretty much all apps). - Was working with unicode characters recently, now whenever I press command+s to save something, it gives me a visual unicode character selector popup, with no apparent way to stop/cancel this behaviour from the popup itself. - Bad defaults in terms of keypress repeat times and rate. No apparent way to change this from settings - need to run commands and re-login to test new behaviour. Just an overall crap OS and UI imo.

jwells89 3y ago
I’ve been using macOS in a multimonitor setup for years without much issue. A good bit of it boils down to macOS expecting monitors to be well-behaved, e.g. each having unique EDIDs (many don’t, instead sharing one across all units of a particular model) and initializing in a timely fashion. > Why can't I move a window to a monitor/workspace that has a maximized window? Because it’s fullscreened, not maximized. macOS doesn’t really have window maximization in the traditional sense out of the box, you need a utility like Magnet or Moom for that. That fullscreen mode was introduced in 10.7 Lion and a lot of long time mac users have found it silly from day one. Personally I never use it. > Text cursor/caret randomly disappears when editing text, so you can't see where the cursor is, and you can't fix this unless you restart the app (happens to pretty much all apps). I’ve seen this, but only in Chromium browsers and Electron apps. Seems like it might be a Blink bug. Regarding other OSes, multimonitor on Linux is mostly fine (so long as you’re using Wayland; X11 is another matter especially if you’re doing something slightly uncommon like using two GPUs, in which case xorg.conf mucking will likely be necessary). By far the most frustration I’ve had with multimonitor is in Windows, which is generally weak there. IIRC it only recently gained the ability to set per-display wallpaper; before you had to glue wallpapers together into a single image that spanned across them, which is silly.

wkat4242 3y ago

It's not hard. The pro can do it. It's simply market positioning to make you spend more.

alberth 3y ago

Only 1-monitor support seems like a market segmentation decision, not a lack of capability. (Much like how the iPhone Pro has faster USB-C data transfer speeds vs base iPhone)

jbverschoor 3y ago
Give me a "pro" which is thinner than and without a fan. or Give me an "air" with two external monitors and 64GB ram. The pros are clunky and heavy. I'm on an air, and will stay there for a long time because if this
- abakker 3y ago
  Aren't the pros and the airs very close to the same weight? the 15" air is 3.3 lbs and the MacBook 14" with the m3 is 3.4lbs. The heaviest 16" with the m3Max is 4.4.
  - nwienert 3y ago
    15 air significantly heavier than 13
joshstrange 3y ago
I agree but the iPhone is a bad example. They used the previous year chip in the non-pro phone (or a binned version IIRC) which didn’t have the USB3 speed support. I guess we will see if next year’s base iPhone has the faster data speed support or not.
josu 3y ago
Yeah, you can actually use these dongles to connect more monitors. https://m1displays.com/ https://m1displays.com/
- mmcnl 3y ago
  A DisplayLink is not a real dock. It's basically compressing the display output using the CPU and decompressing it using an external GPU in a box to output it to more displays. The performance is terrible, you get weird artifacts, there's lag, you can't use it for gaming, etc.

delfinom 3y ago

It's intentional. Apple is going down the path of SKUs to segment their price points. It may also be they have chips that have bad display controllers and they are using this as one way of offloading those chips with the bad controllers lasered off.

hartator 3y ago

I have the Air, it does support its own monitor + a 6k monitor.

quitit 3y ago

The answer is pretty straight forward: it has no fan and limited ram. It supports a 6K screen in addition to the built-in screen. It's reasonable to say that if you need 3 screens to get your job done, then that is not representative of the market for apple's lowest-end laptop.

exabrial 3y ago
Dude my old galaxy phone from yesterday could drive a 4k display
- quitit 3y ago
  Filing this under irrelevant. My dude.
mmcnl 3y ago
The basic office setup in most companies is two screens with a dock (lid closed). That's a super common way of working. RAM and fan has nothing to do with it, the cheapest low-end Windows laptops can do this with ease, it doesn't stress the RAM, CPU or GPU at all.
- quitit 3y ago
  > RAM and fan has nothing to do with it, the cheapest low-end Windows laptops can do this with ease, it doesn't stress the RAM, CPU or GPU at all. - M-series uses unified memory, the ram does in fact matter. - Heat also matters, because throttling. The Air uses a fanless, heatsink system. - Whatever cheapest low-end PC you’re imagining is not fanless and not running an external 6k monitor at 60Hz. - None of those systems are optimised to maintain performance while possessing an 18 hour battery life. None of those even have an 18 hour battery life. The Air serves a clear market segment. It’s their entry level laptop, the problem isn’t the laptop.
asylteltine 3y ago
My super old hp elitebook from 2015 was a piece of shit and yet had to trouble driving two external monitors This is arbitrary market segmentation. I need two external monitors mostly because I share the same single cable to my dock with work and because macOS is so stupid about monitors it randomly connects to one or the other, not both. So I have to manually power off the wrong monitor each time and turn it on for work. Really annoying.

deleted 3y ago

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charlie0 3y ago

If you can afford multiple monitors, surely you can afford a slightly more expensive laptop.