I feel the “Pro” label is somewhat misleading, and has definitely damaged my trust further.
Scroll down to Video Support and see: "One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz."
When I was making a buying decision back in November, the limited external display support came up in every analysis & review I read. I'm not trying to give you a hard time here, but I genuinely don't know how you missed this.
They shouldn’t have called it a pro.
Apple apologists have been regularly redefining what "pro" means every year, along with a lot of other things that aren't a big deal.
What? The M1 MacBook Pro is not the magical device with no compromises???
People were way too enthusiastic and purposely skipped over any weaknesses of the form factor.
People were claiming that it was capped at 16G ram because there were no purpose for having 32G ram (it was amazing to see the hacker news technical set reclaim Bill Gate's "640K ought to be enough for anybody" and "1 monitor is enough for every use case").
There are no perfect computers. Even Apple has to compromise. They were clearly stated but people just didn't want to accept that the M1 isn't a perfect computer that could do everything.
My mother bought a new macbook m1 with me telling her about the monitor stuff and she cant even get her 1080p normal external to work with the dock that the apple store sold her.
It’s definitely an Apple issue, but the specific problem can be worked around by basically not using hdmi (I appreciate we don’t all have that luxury :/)
Do you want 256G ssd size or do you want the upgraded processor or memory size? Do you want 2 usb-c ports or 4 usb-c ports? do you want touchbar or no touchbar?
Apple has market segmentation and compromise down to a science. Apple computers have been forcing people into a compromise for their entire history. Want more features? Give more money. need that money for rent? ok buy the 256G version instead that you can't upgrade because everything is soldered in.... you have more money? pay for 512G version.
And in the dock's case - that's always been the case where apple will happily charge you more money to get certain accessories to work properly. (want this accessory to work? you gotta get the right adapter! oh that old adapter won't work, you gotta get a new one for 80$! oh sorry even with an adapter that old dock won't work anymore, you gotta get the right interface! usb-c vs thunderbolt vs firewire vs usb-c 4!)
There are workloads that don't fit into 16G ram. Even with paging, there are legitimate needs for 32G and beyond memory sizes.
Then your limitation clearly wasn’t RAM.
It can't make it appear out of thin air. If you need 16GB of ram and only have 8GB, you will run out of memory.
However in 2021 I am not interested in a computer with less than 32GB ram. Sure, I could work around the limitations and close not in use programs/tabs to avoid going OOM, or using swap, but life is short and memory is cheap. I'd rather not have to worry about it.
The ONLY time I run out of memory (or leave the "green" memory pressure) is when i use Figma - but that is a known memory hog. And it does crash, it just warns me that im running out of memory and asks to close something.
This is all on an 8GB machine. Previously I had 16GB intel macbook pro (2015) and it simply wasn't possible to run this quantity of applications.
Obviously (as i have said, and keep getting downvoted for), if you are using VMs or you have a specific memory requirement, then you need to account for that.
For context I regularly have open (what I consider to be standard apps):
* IntelliJ IDEA (Pycharm or Clion, never both)
* Slack
* Chrome
* kitty (20 or so terminals)
* Outlook
* yabai & bartender
* littlesnitch & adguard
Another commenter mentioned finding a video showing that it could in fact be "hacked" to use more than one external monitor. I tried purchasing the specific DisplayLink products in the video and still wasn't able to have success :(