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Can the macbook pro retina handle 4 thunderbolt displays (2 on each port as with the Air) + HDMI?

• jpxxx 14y ago
  Negatory. The total volume of pixels the Mac can push is the limiter. As you add monitors, the Mac will eventually black out the laptop display and spend the pixels externally. Beyond that it'll simply refuse to light up the display it can't feed. Doesn't matter which port they're headed out of. Three sizeable displays appears to be the limit. Note: A Thunderbolt display can pass along enough signal for another Thunderbolt display. But not two extra on the chain. And for (presumably) dumb (presumably) Apple Reasons, a non-Thunderbolt display cannot be involved in that chain at all. tl;dr: give Apple all your money
  • veemjeem 14y ago
    probably not apple reasons since thunderbolt is really just intel's lightpeak spec. you probably can't chain a non-thunderbolt display at the end of the chain because the data packets are probably encoded with some device id, and if it doesn't match the current hardware, it would just forward it along the chain, so when these packets arrive at the non-lightpeak compliant display, it wouldn't be able to interpret it. tl;dr: normal displays don't read packet data
    • teilo 14y ago
      This is a limitation of Apple's Thunderbolt display, not Thunderbolt itself. Thunderbolt is designed to allow displayport at the end of a chain. For some reason, Apple chose not to support connecting a displayport adapter directly to a Thunderbolt display, but you can put a daisy-chained device in-between your Thunderbolt display and your displayport display, and it will work.