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Comment by jstsch | Hacker News Reader

I am excited about these. Very curious if they’ll be able to drive my two LG 5K UltraFine displays.

Got those screens right away when the MBP2016 came out. It is a great setup, but unfortunately quite unstable. The MBP2016 had tons of crashes, after 4 logic board replacements it got swapped out for a 2018. More stable, but I still have to follow some ritualistic order plugging/unplugging them…

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I’ve had issues with various external displays over various MBP models forever, particularly waking from sleep. My current display had no problems at all with my previous 2014 15", but when that one died I replaced it with the first gen 16" and all those problems came back.

That said, I stumbled on a solution that’s been almost totally effective: I only ever wake from sleep with the TouchID button. I suspect (not very educated hunch) the problems with this newer model have something to do with timing of wake/power signals being sent before any other device data while waiting for the T2 to unblock.

Anyway, you might give it a try. I think I’ve had to re-plug all of 2-3 times in the last year (whereas failure rate waking from my external keyboard was close to daily before, and required a reboot at least a couple times a week).

The fact that the M1 macbooks can't drive two external displays(even with the internal display switched off) is criminal. I know at least two people who bought a brand new M1 MacBook and returned it the next day for this very reason.

The Mac Mini Can drive two external displays. One via USB-C and one via HDMI.

Up to 6 screens screens can be connected with the aid of DisplayLink on M1 machines

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/24/m1-macs-able-to-run-six...

I have two LG 4K monitors with a 2016 model (which I really want to upgrade). It's mostly fine. Waking from sleep it does go thru an annoying sequence where it wakes up one monitor at a time. When I gave feedback to Apple, they suggested plugging in the dedicated power supply as well. Maybe that would help some of the issues you see.

Just curious, are these issues not enough to make you look elsewhere? Especially since these kind of issues have been common with MacBooks over the past few years. Maybe you require MacOS for something specific? Or is there just nothing else you'd rather use?

Apart from this issue, these machines have been great for me. And the Apple ecosystem is hard to beat (when you get used to the seamless integration between devices…)

I unfortunately (or fortunately) had to get an eGPU to drive the two monitors. Settled on the Razer Core X + Radeon RX GPU as there was no stable way to drive the two LG monitors.

What Mac are you using this eGPU with, out of interest?

I’m kind of fed up with external monitor issues with my MacBooks. It’s one of the main reasons I’ll probably get the M1X Mac Mini for desktop use and a cheap Air for a laptop rather than investing in a new high end M1X MBP to use in clamshell mode.

I think things got a lot worse when Apple ditched first party displays. I bought LGs because that’s what Apple sold and they just don’t work reliably enough (constant wake from sleep issues, across multiple laptops, macOS versions and cables/docks).

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