Using an iPad as the main display for a Mac Mini
lunadisplay.com
lunadisplay.com
Recommendation: Do not buy.
if i understand it correctly sidecar supports using the keyboard attached to the iPad (but not the mouse)
I'm really sorry to hear you had a poor experience with Luna Display. We do support both the iPad keyboard and Mini DisplayPort so I'd be happy to try to get this figured out for you.
You can contact me directly matt@astropad.com and we'll get thing sorted!
Seems like you're facing some tough choices. You have a few choices:
1) Accept the company is going to shrink, and do so cleanly. Engineer the product to be maintainable by a small team. Acquihire away some of your engineers (although that's tough in the COVID19 job market). Etc.
2) Find a way to pursue major growth. This almost certainly requires you to do major pivots and take on major risks.
3) Do nothing, and watch the company go from black into the red. Have successive rounds of demoralizing layoffs, and watch the software bitrot into obscurity.
You can:
1) Continue to provide the existing product under the existing pricing model, with a much smaller market. You'll have less revenue, and less means to improve the product; you'll basically wait for Sidecar 2.0 to eliminate that vestigial market.
2) Continue with the product at a lower price point. I'd never buy your product for $80 / year, but I'd definitely do it for $5/year. I have an older iPad 2 I could repurpose as an additional monitor, or better yet, a digitizer tablet.
3) Go sleazeball and maximize short-term revenue: mine your user's private data, false advertising, the works.
4) Pivot into a changed world, and introduce something to add a lot of additional value. That requires vision, aggressive engineering, etc. Most such pivots fail, but some do work.
By far the biggest risk is to do nothing. That's a choice in itself.
Personally, if I were in your shoes, I'd think through remote work and remote teaching right now, and see how to best support that. That's the growth model. iPads have digitizers, spare cameras, etc. all of which can be awesome for this sort of work. So do many other devices. Cross-marketing can be huge here too (cheap software, expensive hardware up-sells, or expensive integrations). You can often make more money as part of a solution in an ecosystem than as a solution.
Best of luck.
We found that there is still a market for our products, Luna Display[0] and Astropad[1]. Apple's Sidecar has limited features and doesn't support older devices.
For the past year, we've been rewriting our code base in Rust and we are nearing completion (you can read about why we chose Rust[2]) Our codebase previously was Objective-C/C and this kept us tied to the Mac platform.
Now with a solid Rust core we will be bringing both Astropad and Luna Display to the Windows ecosystem, a market that is 10x bigger! We are launching for Windows later this year and if you're interested I encourage you to get on our wait list: https://astropad.com/windows/
We also have a slew of new remote work products in development (we've been a remote team since 2013), but I'm not ready to share details yet ;)
- [0] https://www.lunadisplay.com
- [1] https://www.astropad.com
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
http://www.mactips.info/2011/07/how-to-use-your-ipad-or-ipho...
Since Air Display was not part of macOS and was not created by Apple, we could probably say that Air Display (like Duet and Astropad) was Sherlocked by Apple/Sidecar.
That being said, it's a pretty obvious feature that I've wanted since the first iPad. I started using Air Display when it first came out, but it always felt clunky and I wanted a simple wired solution that was included in the box and "just worked."
In this case, SideCar is enabled on newer Macs (Catalina) and iOS 13, requiring people with unsupported Macs or iPads to upgrade their hardware to these requirements [0] which is unnecessary for this feature when AstroPad supports older Macs, Apple Pencil and iPads on the minimum requirements. [1]
So, yes. Hardly sherlocked, unlike several software only companies who get completely sherlocked in all areas every WWDC.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210380#systemrequirements
[1] https://lunadisplay.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions
I'm still waiting to see how ipadOS evolves, but I'd would consider using using such a setup with a mac and a surface go.
(That’s ignoring the new weekly crashes that the virus/firewall scanner now causes... which is another story).
I've been trying the built-in screen sharing VNC, and that too is very laggy.
The Mac mini has tested fast (iperf3.. latency and bandwidth are good) over WiFi, so I think an app has the potential to be fast.
Your use case seems to be different.
What do you mean by this statement?
Personally I'm extremely happy with Sidecar and being able to use an iPad/pencil as a smaller Cintiq.
RIP Target Display Mode. ;-(
I recently found another use case for my Luna display by the way, when I wanted to play some real-money online poker in the garden (shelter in place makes you want to do things like that ;-). Apple does not allow gambling applications on iOS, and screen sharing Pokerstars on my Mac Mini using VNC was a really shitty experience. So what I do now is start the Luna app on the Mac Mini, connect the iPad to it, then take it out into the garden (which has its own wifi AP) and put it on full screen. Responsiveness and touch control are excellent that way.
I guess that would be easy to check by running kextstat before and after plugging in the DisplayPort.
Sadly I only have a 2013 Mac Pro (which has AMD graphics only) so it will operate differently. :/
But it is a resistor.
I’m using this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CXX7QL5 (non-affiliate link) which supports 4K@60 resolutions.
Tempted to switch my main machine over to Linux but still want access to OSX.
At home I have a Slackware workstation, a Windows gaming machine, and a Mac mini, each with a dedicated display. Again, I can drag my mouse pointer to the left or right edge to access either of the screens/PCs left or right of my main display.
There is an open source fork called Barrier as well.
I've been very happy with how it works. I've gone from a 2007 to a 2012 to a 2018 Mac Mini using it. There are times, almost only when I'm upgrading to the new computer, that I have to break out the physical connector and use an external display.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/display-menu/id549083868?mt=12
- https://www.ebay.com/c/1874959655
- http://www.micro-coaxial.com/product-detail/edp-to-dp-cable-...
Has anyone have an experience with those?
My recommendation for these are the converter boards from AbuseMark [0]. In addition to the basic DP-eDP adapters, he also has HDMI and miniDP versions of the boards. Powering the boards for the backlight is also easier as it's just USB. It seems that he's introduced a USB-C version recently as well. He also has a number of very useful "accessories", like different cables for the various kinds of LCD panels, or a specialized DP-HDMI adapter that handles the odd resolution properly. It looks like shipping from Japan is on hold for the time being, but I highly recommend them once shipping is back up.
I wonder if this app manages to get around that somewhat through trickery?
But I do not doubt you are describing a real problem. Can you tell me under what circumstances using a remote desktop requires a mouse and keyboard to be physically plugged in?
0: https://macminicolo.net/blog/files/build-a-dummy-dongle-for-...
1: https://www.amazon.com/NewerTech-Headless-Video-Accelerator-...
I had no idea. That could explain why VNC is slow on my mini, but since I use it primarily as a headless server, I can live with that.
The main negative outcome of such setup is degrading the battery life of the tablet/phone when used with the cable for better latency.
I think if people use sidecar with USB cable for charging all the time, soon Apple might remove the feature due to battery replacement complaints.
I'll also mention that for whatever reason Luna works far better than Duet. I always get black bars and lag on Duet, but Luna is generally flawless (except for the occasional crash or random switch from wired->wireless connection).
Corrected that headline for you ;)
Panic's dashboard was one of these things, Luna Display would be another.
From the other side of the spectrum, if the Mac Mini is not a primary computer, sticking it in some closet and using a VNC/Luna Display/Duet like combination to use it from a modern iPad is pretty efficient. The rest of the time you just keep using your iPad for any other intents or purpose.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/3/5/2848097/futulele-ipad-ipho...
I also have a headless mini, so... For me it’s a cheap solution as it recycles older hardware.
A simple dictionary search (multiple dictionaries) backs this up.
Comparing the SoCs of the RPi4 to the iPad Pro, the Pro's A12Z has 8 cores vs the 4 of the Pi's Cortex-A72, more L1 cache, way more L2 cache, 8 GPU cores on chip (vs the Pi's separate GPU (which has at most 4 cores)), etc. etc.
The only meaning of "oomph" which I could imagine that would put the Pi ahead of the iPad would be in flexibility in terms of what can be done with the device.
That's exactly the point.
A RPi is currently much more flexible than an iPad for some workflows that need a terminal or desktop software. For this use case, the iPad acts as a self-contained power supply, internet connection and thin client. However the iPad's own capabilities are recently improving with the new features of iPadOS.
Of course, what would be even better is if ipad had games selection like the switch
Many games on ipad are not built with couch coops with controllers as first class citizens
I'm actually gonna implement this setup (I'm looking out for used Mac minis on my local equivalent to eBay this week), for when my iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard get delivered over the next couple weeks.
This means I'll be able to use the setup for sketching and illustration, video-editing, note-taking and other typical iPad tasks, but then also be able to hook it up to the headless Mac mini (which I plan to stash in a cupboard) and use Xcode and other MacOS-only applications.
No idea how well this is gonna work, but I'm certainly looking forward to illustrating again - something I've barely done for the last few years, and which used to be a large and very satisfying part of my work (in the days before narrow specialization was such a thing).
I had noticed that, and that's why I was wondering if an HDMI dummy (a simple device that pretends to be an HDMI display) could be the primary display, using sidecar so an iPad would be the secondary display, mirroring the primary.
Just thought I'd note that in case this setup is very important to you before you buy your Mac Mini. I don't do any sort of graphics design and video editing, but people seem to be generally pretty happy with it for those purposes.
Also, many of the free drawing Apps in the App Store are actually very full-featured and feel fantastic to draw with (please support them if you like them), which is what I settled on in the end. The only thing that I miss about my Wacom Intuos is the textured surface.
Edit: removed repeated "a couple of months ago" and "in case", moved things around a little.
For video I’m gonna try the iOS application LumaFusion - this is new to me, so I have no idea how it compares to apps like Final Cut Pro or Premiere, that I’ve used in the past - but I’ve seen some encouraging YouTube videos showing editors using it, at what seems to me blinding speed.
The Mac mini would only be used for Xcode and other stuff that isn’t available on iOS (or iPadOS).
But if you have a mac mini sitting around, and you also have an iPad, it's an innovative way to reuse the hardware you've got for only $50 -- especially if you're space- or cash-constrained.
For much of what a tablet is intended for, a mouse makes no sense (or rather, touch makes most sense). But for operating a desktop GUI which was designed for a mouse, then obviously a mouse is at an advantage.