I believe this is due to the TB4 spec requiring support for two external displays on a single port. The base spec M series SoCs only support one external display.
I’d expect the ports to work identically to a TB4 port in all other aspects.
I'm sure there is some kind of technical explanation but both Intel and NVIDIA seemed to managed 3+ scanouts even on low end parts for a long time.
I mean, it almost certainly is? I would guess a majority of the low-end SKUs are rarely if ever attached to one external display. Two would be rarer still.
I can pick areas where Apple is beating Intel. Different products have different feature matrices, news at 11.
It does seem like a shame, though—Intel’s IOT department seems to try lots of things, but not get many hits.
they operate 100% on profitability, not what's technically feasible. They are extremely focused on making money. Yes, there is a reason after all.
Almost always it’s maximizing profit margins rather than anything else.
I recently went on a 5-day trip and forgot to bring the charger for my M2. The first day I thought I'd have to rush around and find one. By the fourth day I still had 8% and then finally realized I could charge it via USB-C instead of magsafe.
Just 2 would be enough. Which seems like a basic feature their competitors are are capable of supporting for a very low costs.
They in fact are competing on checkboxes, specifically they are probably using this limitation to upsell theirs more expensive models.
Some of them were trying out Apple Silicon replacements, though I'm not aware of what they did monitor wise. Probably used the excuse to buy a single large ultrawide each instead, though I don't actually know. ;)
MacBook Air is a world-leading form factor for travel, it's not "low-end".
MBA with extra storage/RAM can exceed revenue of base MBP.
The travel form factor of MBA is not available for MBP, for any price.
Heh, that's not how I would describe MacBook Pros. ;)
Honestly, I'm an accountant and everyone in my office uses 2-3 monitors with $1,200 business ultrabook.
you're saying they're low-end because Intel? if you've got your macbook connected to two monitors, you're not very concerned about battery performance.
So isn't Intel silicon competitive speedwise? I thought the M[0-4]s were OK but sort of hypey as to being better in all regards.
I’d seriously consider not taking a job if they were still on Intel MacBooks. I appreciate that an arch switch isn’t a piece of cake for many many workloads, and it isn’t just a sign of employers cheaping out. But for me it’s just been such a significant improvement.
And even if you do not care about battery, you still care about throttling.
Real world, the M series chips are by far the best I’ve ever used as a software engineer and it’s not even close.
What dev shop immediately buys all developers the newest and shiniest thing as soon as its released without trialing it first?
At least at the time, things worked a bit easier having the entire pipeline (dev -> prod) use a single architecture.
(Overall the transition was super smooth, but it wasn't instant or without bumps)
If the company bought Pro or Max chips and not base models, it wouldn’t be a problem.
But with the general power of the base model Apple Silicon I don't think most dev shops really need the higher end models, honestly.
Those are harder questions to answer. We could assume Apple crunched the numbers. Or perhaps they just stuck to the status quo.
Only an insider or decision maker (maybe that’s you) knows.
But it’s a frustrating limitation and remains one of the only areas their old intel based laptops were better at.
I think it's weird though how far people go to defend Apple. It's objectively making (some) users worse off. Apple clearly doesn't care and the people defending them also clearly don't. But the affected users do care and "but money" isn't really a good excuse for them. It also doesn't solve their problem of not being able to use two external monitors anymore without spending significantly more money.
On the MacBook Air one output is connected to the internal display leaving one output for an external display.
(The Mac Mini that uses the same SoC is limited to 2 external displays for the same reason)
To support more displays they would have to add support for a second Thunderbolt bus to the base SoC.
The base-tier chips are designed as high-volume tablet chips first and foremost, with ultramobility crossover capability.
Using DisplayLink or certain kinds of thunderbolt multimonitor are possible while running outside the pixel pipe or running multiple monitors on a single pixel pipe (this is not MST which is multiple pixel pipes on a single stream). But yeah it's ugly especially on a base-tier processor with this eating cycles/dumping heat. You're running the hardware encoder at least.
Discord had this weird error if you tried to enable the screen/audio capture, it tries to launch something and fails and the solution is you need to manually install "airfoil" because it's an audio capture module that discord licensed. you don't have to fully install it but the audio driver is the part that discord uses and that goes first (has to be allowed as a kext, ie non-secure mode). theoretically a kernel-level capture like that could be a ton faster than userland, I think that's the on-label use of airfoil.
And to not support industry standard NVIDIA GPU on ARM Macs, too. 1 GPU typically supports 5 output over as little bandwidth as PCIe x1.
AMD is 6 displays. You see this rarely on consumer boards but the ASRock 5700 XT Taichi for some inexplicable reason did expose all six -- with four DisplayPorts to boot, too. I do not think there has been 4 DP or six output customer cards since.
I'm sure it's a marketing explanation: they make bigger margins on more expensive machines, and they need some feature differentiators to nudge people to move up. 2 extra displays is a poweruser/pro feature.
They make their own silicon, it's not like they're shy about designing hardware, if they wanted to stuff features into the lower end books they easily could.