- All M1 models only have 1 Thunderbolt Controller, thus can only handle 2 Thunderbolt ports on all announced models so far.
- All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K.
- No M1 model supports >16GB of RAM or 10GB Ethernet.
All of the above seem like bandwidth limitations to save cost that a future "M1X" or "M2" or "X1" would be extremely likely to fix, and that's where you'll see the bandwidth increase.
You can disable the built in display on (some?) Intel MBPs via `sudo nvram boot-args="niog=1"` according to another poster. Whether this is supported on M1's remains to be seen.
Where did you find this? In the Macbook Pro 13 landing page I find the specs per Thunderbolt port which states the display capabilities for each while not restricting anywhere to just one monitor.
So I'd would expect 1x monitor per Thunderbolt port leading to total 3 displays for the Pro ARM model: one internal and two external displays. I assume the restriction you refer to just applies to the Air model.
> Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and:
>
> One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
For laptops, you can use an external dongle. It has its uses, like for a NAS on a 10G network for video or other data-intense work.
- An 8x cdrom narrowly beats 10meg ethernet.
- 1x dvdrom narrowly beats 100meg ethernet.
- ATA133 narrowly beats 1gbit ethernet.
Original SATA is 1.5gbit, so 1Gbit ether bottlenecks us to 1999 storage speeds.