Big Sur 11.1 External Display Issues | Hacker News Reader

Big Sur 11.1 External Display Issues

discussions.apple.com

85 pointsdoener77 comments

Yup, this is why I've been holding off of upgrading to Big Sur along with this other external monitor deal breaker - https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/651131 .

To be honest, as a new OSX user after a subpar experience with my XPS 15 9550, I was really looking forward to the "It just works" experience with my $3K+ MBP 16, but I have been sorely disappointed. I get regular kernel panic induced shutdowns that I can reproduce when plugging several different MBP compatible docks. Some days, Zoom plus web browser will bring the entire machine to its knees and make it behave like a netbook from years past. Multi monitor support is a giant crapshoot and there is a 50-50 chance all monitors get recognized properly or you keep unplugging and replugging till all your monitors get recognized correctly.

Opening new apps feels excruciatingly slow due to OSX sandboxing and I feel like I'm using a subpar laptop from 8 years ago. Finder is still an abomination in comparison to any sane file browser.

At this point, the experience definitely hasn't been smoother than with my last XPS15, and I am likely to move back to Windows with my next laptop upgrade at work. I just get the feeling that developers or users like me are an afterthought when it comes to Apple.

Fwiw, bought 3 MBP16 on release a year ago (one for my partner personally, one for myself and a coworker for work) and the one that was for me had the exact same issues you described with kernel panics, spontaneous reboots, anger at trying to use a dock or an external monitor (tried to use diff cables, didn’t help). Other two had no issues whatsoever. After 3wks, took it to an Apple store and swapped out for a new one and never had a problem again. They didn’t ask many questions in the store, but it might have been because I had purchased >20k in gear in the past month.

Once again, as in decades past, the question is begged:

What configurations do engineers at Apple work with ?

Multiple monitors is not a fringe use-case or some weird preference ... in order for these bugs to survive into release software, it must be the case that somehow, inexplicably, Apple engineers don't use multiple monitors.

How can that be ? Who are they ? What do they work with ?

This is especially true for portrait mode monitors. Ever since Catalina portrait mode/90 dev rotation screens reset to landscape every time you unlock the machine. I do it 5-6 times a day and have the mouse/key presses memorized. Yes, YES I want to keep these changes!!!

I'm not an Apple engineer, but I do development without a second monitor. I rarely miss it; it's not often that I actually need to look at two different full-screen windows at the same time. Usually alt-tabbing works just as well, and keeps my visual landscape more focused.

> I do development without a second monitor.

Same here. Might have something to do with age, as popular deskop/external monitor sizes these days just seem _enormous_ to me -- back in the day a 21" monitor was considered large (24" and 27" seem very common today). You almost have to turn your head back and forth just to see the entire screen!

I have triple 32" monitors and I don't use them to multitask, per se ... I use them to display multiple contexts and inputs for single tasks.

It is not uncommon for me to be working on a single task that involves a (long) terminal window, a browser window and a second browser window.

Sometimes one of the screens is completely blank/empty and I much prefer that to the lack of a screen at all.

I guess much as with housing, some like small homes and some prefer "McMansions".

If it works for you, then right on.

I went from using a 34" ultrawide to just the laptop because I decided I would rather sit in a lounge chair than at a desk

Also not an Apple engineer, but I have worked for a different FAANG. I've never used two monitors; I prefer one large monitor with the top edge of the screen as close to eye level as possible. Lots of people seem to jack up their monitors on a stack of O'Reilly books or whatever, but that makes my eyes tired from tilting my head up. I have enough screen real estate to do a typical engineering workflow and I've never missed not having a second monitor.

> top edge of the screen as close to eye level as possible. Lots of people seem to jack up their monitors on a stack of O'Reilly books or whatever,

This was based on some (completely bogus) "ergonomics" advice which somehow worked its way into European office furniture standards and various official seeming guides. It is (wrong) conventional wisdom that the middle of the display should be at eye level.

If you track down stuff written by anatomy and vision experts, you'll find that among static positions it is best (causes least neck and/or eye strain) to keep the top edge at approximately eye level, push the display as far away from the head as possible given the desk and general context (it is much easier to focus on something 1 meter away for an extended time than something 20 cm away), and tilt the display so that the bottom is closer than the top, so that a perpendicular ray from the middle of the display is roughly aimed at the face. But keep the head upright and supported directly above the spinal column with the back straight (not tilting the head forward/back or resting it on a fixed external support for extended periods of time).

This physical arrangement works because human eyes are set up physiologically to easily swivel down and to focus closer and converge with less strain in the bottom part of the field of view than the top part. (Presumably because when we evolved looking down typically involved closer objects than looking straight ahead.) Eyes are great at looking alternately straight ahead or substantially downward without moving or tilting the head.

(Personally I appreciate having a second physical display next to the first, though how useful it is depends on the task and software.)

Another thing I forgot to mention is that if you are constantly tilting your head back so that your eyes are not on a level plane (looking up constantly), it increases eye strain because they've found that your tear ducts have to work harder to moisten your eyes. Another reason why setting up your monitor as you describe is better ergonomics.

“constantly tilting your head back”

Can you clarify what that means as in the ideal case the head is not tilted forward to begin with.

It is more comfortable to look downward than look upward, while the head is in a fixed position. If you often need to look upward for longer than a glance, you are likely to tilt your head back a bit to relieve strain on eye muscles (trading it for strain on neck muscles).

Often people compensate by resting their head on a headrest and leaning back against a back rest. Often this causes shoulder and back strain. Then they use an armrest or palmrest to type, causing RSI from static loads on bent wrists.

There are two main ways to avoid static muscle loads that cause discomfort and long-term problems. One is to regularly change position. Another is to default to a neutral and comfortable basic position.

Do you know what the relative trade off is between eye muscle strain and neck muscle strain? Although intuitively the head is a lot heavier than the eyeballs the neck muscles should be much stronger to compensate. Perhaps the neck spinal column will be deformed after a while?

You can reduce both by lowering the display so that its top is roughly at eye level (or maybe up to 5° above or something), and tilting it backward a bit.

Ideally you want to find a neutral position where there is as little static load on any of your muscles as possible (including the eye muscles used for accommodation (focusing), convergence, and turning your eyes around). Temporary dynamic muscle loads are fine, but static loads get tiring and lead to long-term problems.

OK. I didn't write that with much precision. What I mean is assuming you are sitting comfortably upright in a neutral position and your gaze is level, horizontal and perpendicular to the floor, tilting your head back so that your line of sight is at a 5-30 degree upward angle is a recipe for eye and neck strain because your eyes have to work harder to relax and refresh. It is much more comfortable and natural for your line of sight to be slightly below level, several degrees or more angled downward.

So what this means for most people is: don't prop your monitor up on a stack of books or an additional stand, simply place the monitor on your desk and adjust the attached stand so that the top edge of the monitor is level with your natural, relaxed line of sight and then tilt the bottom of the monitor up very slightly as described by someone else above.

Apple has a good resource on ergonomics: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT205655

that's a good idea. better ergonomics. Terrible thing for your neck and shoulders to work twisted to the side.

(good ergonomics are basically keeping your body balanced in a neutral position)

I doubt it is a matter of needing a second monitor, nobody said that. I can also live and work through the summer without aircon, doesn't mean it's not a very nice thing to have that can help with productivity.

I never understand people who object that they don't see the point of having a bigger table to lay out all their papers because layering them one over the other and swapping paper sheets or notebook pages is enough for them.

There must be some engineers that noticed that, probably in a different team, that tried to raise their concern one way or another but probably hit the bureaucracy wall.

In my experience, most companies put their employees on their own equipment, possibly prototype equipment.

I've worked places where the only customers using all-branded-equipment were the ones who drank all the kool-aid, every drop.

So if you work at dell, you're probably using a dell computer, a dell monitor and a dell-approved operating system.

If you're at apple, I'm guessing you're working on an apple computer, apple display, apple keyboard, apple mouse (ick!) or trackpad. You're probably not using a an apple computer and a dell monitor (although that's what I've done for years and years).

I'm sure there are lots more cross-platform checks with covid and people working at home - but probably not as much new stuff.

They have thousands of people that could be testing iOS as wells but there are so many horrible bugs.

I have two external monitors, and it works. It must be some weird fringe scenario. They still should have caught it, but it’s not impacting every single user.

> What configurations do engineers at Apple work with ?

Unix workstations for EDA tools such as Cadence.

Windows machines for mechanical engineering CAD tools.

Software engineers. You know, the people actually building the OS that doesn’t work, what do they use?

>Windows machines for mechanical engineering CAD tools.

Also windows for all firmware development.

Fixing bugs is not profitable.

Just reported this to my job. Almost all of us use Macbook Pros for work; and, almost all of us have multiple monitors all connected through Type-C to something (probably DisplayPort or HDMI).

I'm rocking 2 separate type-C to HDMI adapters for my setup.

I continue to be disappointed with Apple's desktop experience.

Apple QC continues to plummet. No surprise, they are woefully understaffed where it matters.

I’ve found apple hardware to be better than ever, but Apple software to be worse than ever. I think they are building software with complexity beyond what they have the processes to handle.

I’m always surprised by this. Their sealed machines have heat throttling issues, graphics card failures, they’re not repairable (iMacs are THE WORST for this), keyboard issues, and that’s all ahead of the Intel chipset issues.

Until the m1 chips, I could say I don’t care at all about their hardware. Their software is buggy, but it’s irreplaceable and the most important thing for me. There’s nothing else out there like it.

It wasn’t always like this though... the rolling yearly releases changed much.

A perfect example: Xcode. Each major release is a nightmare and only after a year of bug fixes is it usable. And then another major release and it's broken again.

  > I continue to be disappointed with Apple's desktop 
  > experience.

Agree! I switched to MacOS during Tiger, and the experience has gotten steadily worse since then, double if you're not into the iOS-ification of their desktop OS. I know iOS is driving their +1T market cap, but come on.

So I pick up a beefy Windows machine for gaming and video editing. And Windows is just awful. They're trying, but it's still an inconsistent mess, UX all over the place depending on what first-party program you're in. I get some folks like it, but it isn't for me.

But I've also got various Linux distros running, and Gnome is actually really usable. And honestly I don't have a lot of bugs or missing functionality -- new Lenovo laptop, Arch or Ubuntu, everything just works out of the box, including external displays that don't even require an adapter because I have HDMI out! But there are definitely bugs and issues, and there's no software support. I'm lucky I get MS Teams so I can work with my coworkers, but I don't get virtual backgrounds. I'd kill for some first-class support from vendors, but I know why it doesn't happen.

Moral of this story: apparently, as we approach the year of the Common Era Two Thousand Twenty One, desktop computing is still a mess.

I recently got an external monitor for my work Macbook. I plugged it in and soon found out that closing the laptop doesn't put it to sleep anymore. I can kind of see why somebody would want this behavior in some situations. I can't at all see why this would be the default, or why there would be no way to toggle the behavior.

> I continue to be disappointed with Apple's desktop experience.

Same here.

> and soon found out that closing the laptop doesn't put it to sleep anymore

I'm fairly sure this has never been the case, or at least not for a very long time. As a long time Macbook user with external display, the expected behavior of closing the lid is to keep the laptop running as if the external monitor is the main display.

Isn’t that called clamshell mode? If so it’s been that way for years. Easy to change IIRC also.

At least going back to the original MacBook. The one with the 10GB hard drive, around 2001-ish, did this.

It's a feature, not a bug.

For myself, I expect to be able to close the laptop and continue using the external display.

Why? Maybe if there is an external keyboard and mouse, but even then it seems bad. As the default it seems counter productive -- closing a laptop should do the same thing regardless of peripherals, unless you specify otherwise.

I'm a fan of consistent behavior, but actually I'm on the side of not sleeping with a display plugged in. Going to sleep when there are no peripherals plugged in is only a sane default because there's no way to actually use the device with no access to the keyboard/mouse/screen.

OTOH, one can still reasonably use a closed laptop if it has a display plugged in, so closing the lid no longer implies an intent to stop using it. Because of this alone, going to sleep in this context might not be the most sane default.

Some examples of when I've personally closed a laptop with the screen plugged in without wanting it to sleep:

* Working at a desk where the laptop doesn't fit with the lid open * Starting a video when connected to a TV in a dark room, where the laptop's screen is a distracting source of light

I'm not saying it shouldn't be possible, just that it shouldn't be the default.

Mac laptops have done this for at least 18 years, probably longer. That's the way they're designed, and how they are used by many people.

Then why is anyone complaining about it? I mean, it seems like a silly default to me, but if it's expected then I'm on the wrong side of what to expect it seems.

For thermal reasons this used to not be possible, and probably still isn’t on older hardware.

Power + mouse + display = docking station.

you can turn this off.

system settings -> power adapter -> 1. option

I've run into https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an... so I need to use clamshell mode.

Their new products aren't necessarily better in all ways, so beware before upgrading. True for most manufacturers. Some things I'm watching to gauge maturity of M1 Macs and Big Sur:

  - DDC support is broken: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl/issues/323
  - Rosetta + debugger crashes: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/44958
  - nmap crashes whole machine (!): https://github.com/nmap/nmap/issues/2193
  - and of course the Homebrew compatibility table: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857

Apple's reaction: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212027

"Apple is aware of this issue and resolution is planned for a future macOS update.

To see the additional resolutions for your external display, choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, click Displays, then press and hold the Option key while you click Scaled."

I've had serious external display issues since they moved to Thunderbolt-3

Given they don't even support 5120x1440 on displayport on Mac OS, while bootcamp windows can on the same hardware, Apple just is not prioritizing external hardware that isn't in their store.

I agree that the support for uncommon resolutions is less than ideal. That said, I've gotten it to work. Caveat: sample size of one.

On a 2019 MacBook Pro 16" with the dedicated GPU, I've had success connecting a 5120x1440 Samsung CRG9 via DisplayPort. I had to use this adapter [0] and this cable [1] to do so, but it does work. It also works on a 2018 MacBook Pro 13", but due to the lack of a dedicated GPU (i.e., Intel graphics only), the output is a bit fuzzy as it's not a natively supported resolution. Still, it's good enough for productivity work, though not for video/photo editing or gaming.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07F17ZHJY

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B079736Z53

5120x1440 120Hz works fine on my MBP?

Even with switch res x, the most I can push vertically is 1080 with the same aspect ratio. I have pushed a standard 16:9 4K before.

In particular, my MacBook is the 2015 model, 15 inch.

My solution is switch res x with two outputs, 2K each, and picture by picture mode. However it has problems. Like you can’t zoom cast a window that overlaps the center.

In case it helps anyone:

I remember when I upgraded to Catalina, macOS wouldn’t allow me to vertically rotate my two external displays anymore (as per my pre-upgrade setup). Then I remembered Apple introduced Sidecar, which I decided to turn off (using ‘defaults’); issue gone.

I’ve had display issues for years so I doubt it’s anything particularly new about Big Sur, just something else changes that made it happen for more people. Glad Apple is noticing because I’ve reported issues like crazy and they get ignored.

It’s 2021 and macOS still doesn’t support DisplayPort MST on a $3500 laptop. Bought two expensive Dell USB-C monitors and found that I can’t daisy chain them - have to connect them individually, taking up two ports.

You have to remember the incredible amount of data that is in a video signal. Here’s an article that describes the choices available (and the trade-offs) in video over USB-C:

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/19/explaining-4k-60hz-...

I'm on 11.1 on a Mac Mini (latest Intel version) with 3 external displays. Two are connected via USB-C directly which means they are passively converting to DisplayPort. One is connected to HDMI from the Mac directly. All are 4k and all work fine.

That said, two of these displays were just purchased. They are kinda cheapo small "portable" displays (12.5" 4k native) which I primarily use for things like always visible terminal or slack/etc.

While experimenting with exactly how I wanted to connect these, I did for a time use Belkin's higher end USB-C to HDMI and had it misbehaving kind of randomly. After switching things around and connecting the one monitor with HDMI directly to the Mac I still had some issues... until I disabled FreeSync on the display itself and those issues disappeared.

The reality is that external displays have become extremely complex in the last few years with numerous optional functionalities such as HDR (which 100% always looks like garbage to me, I don't get the appeal) and VRR and so forth. Any issues I have experienced with external displays seem to have relationship with how complex the display's feature set is.

In this case, I wouldn't be surprised if the issue was linked to some subset of features that 11.1 breaks on now. I might suggest toggling such features off if possible on your displays to see if it helps anything.

I have a similar issue, with Type-C->Displayport.

Monitors turn on, but either in the wrong resolution or wrong frame rate. I can force the resolution or force the frame rate.

I'm glad I took a 3 week vacation right when I upgraded, because I can't get any work done with only a single working 16" monitor.

(However, I can't even remotely get the same setup working in Linux on the same machine so I can't really blame the walled-garden for this frustration)

Maybe not on a macbook, but I can drive two 1440p panels from a single type-c output on Linux just fine.

I used to be so excited when Apple released new updates that I would upgrade MacOS and iOS the day they came out. After a few catastrophes which negatively impacted my ability to use the product or do work I've been forced to take a difference approach. The wake up was after I believe either Lion or Leopard where I would get 5-10 blue screens of death a day making working incredibly frustrating (or impossible) for several months. These days I wait until at least the first dot one patch, most of the time I wait even longer. It's really too bad they can't get the QA under control. It feels like every major Apple software release these days is littered with issues. Many feel like table stakes use cases which should have been caught.

There are multiple display problems in 11.1. As soon as I installed 11.1 on my M1 Mini that is connected to my TV's receiver, I could no longer get a stable connection to it via screen sharing unless I unplugged the HDMI from the Mini. The resolution constantly flipped back and forth, and eventually threw an authentication error. I had no such problems on 11.0.

There have been tons of display issues especially with the M1 Mac Minis. I honestly expect a lot of them to be resolved (if possible) in 11.2. Apple even called me directly so they could understand my problem better even though I had returned my Mac Mini. I'm confident they're on it.

Big Sur 11.1 did fix a bug of M1 Macs not being able to reinitialize connections to external displays or wrongly detect the resolution of the integrated display. I no longer have external display issues on M1 MacBook Pro. Might be related?

I had no external display issues on the M1 Mini until I installed 11.1.

My MacMini 2018 has monitor wake up problems over 2 years. I have to restart it many times to boot it up everyday (Let MacMini reset settings)

big sur is the first osx release I have downgraded from after upgrading on my personal laptop, and also downgraded on a new device that came with it installed (new mac mini).

I do not plan to upgrade to it unless forced to. my first osx version ever was snow leopard, so I'm not THAT much of an old school user. but I've never felt the need to do this in more than ten years.

my first osx version ever was snow leopard

That explains a lot. Snow Leopard was also my first OSX version, and I guess I got spoiled by the stability. In fact after using it for years, I don't remember a single kernel panic or crash. The best OS Apple ever shipped IMO. Everything after that was more buggy.

I wasn’t aware you could run an M1 with Catalina...

You can still buy "new" Intel Minis. But I think you're right, installing anything < macOS 11 will be impossible on a M1 Mini.

I had a similar problem. Also, sleep mode was not activated when then laptop screen was shut. Restart didn't work. I shut down and for some reason all the screens were reset and sleep mode activation worked again. Nonetheless, this problem is different from mine.

Pasting comment downvoted to oblivion with valid points. Can we have some functionality in HN comments that are not liked by majority for "some reason", to be visible? " LeoNatan25 31 minutes ago [flagged] [dead] [–]

People got excited about the m1 machines Apple released, but remember, those machines are tied to some of the worst tested and often regressing piece of software out there—Apple operating systems. Had they released these machines ten years ago, things would have looked very different. But knowing that macOS—Big Sur in particular—is the only supported OS in these machines just kills any curiosity I have, let alone excitement. And my career is basically in the Apple software ecosystem in the last 10 years. What I don’t understand is how shilling and fanboyish the Apple developer community is with regards to such bugs. Apple can do no wrong. “All software JS bugs.” “Privacy matter the most, the hell with basic computer functionality.” And so on. It boggles the mind. The amount of people that seem to have tied their personal identity to the Apple brand is very large, almost cult-like."

Considering three of the five posts that user made in the last months are about how terrible various Apple products are, I'd argue their sense of identity is linked to that particular brand far more than many fanboys' and fangirls'.

(And the functionality, i. e. seeing flagged posts, exists? Or how did you manage to see and copy it?

Click the timestamp of the comment then click [vouch], and upvote it if it's got voting buttons.

Don't re-paste it.

I'm running 11.2 beta and having the same issue.

How fast is apple to fix bugs like that? I am also affected.

This kind of shit makes me so glad I'm running Debian unstable instead of macOS.

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