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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

I feel very disappointed that the laptops lack decent i/o. They spend all this time talking about how advanced the GPU is, but it's a $1,600 laptop that can only power one external display or a 2,000 laptop that can only power two displays?

Plus they are nerfing the desktops by only offering the all-in-ones with m2, so you can walk into a store and want to buy any other desktop now you are paying a huge premium for outdated tech :(

I was really hoping for FaceID and better display support, but I don't feel there was any compelling reason to upgrade anything. If you preferred Windows before, you probably still prefer Windows. If you have an M processor there is no compelling reason to upgrade. If you were thinking about getting a Studio or a mini, you should probably just wait until they update the processor.

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> I feel very disappointed that the laptops lack decent i/o. They spend all this time talking about how advanced the GPU is, but it's a $1,600 laptop that can only power one external display or a 2,000 laptop that can only power two displays?

yep. powering 2+ screens on a mac is not a straightforward process. for the prices Apple is charging on their "pro" machines, it should be simple to plug in 2 or even more screens to get work done.

Genuinely curious: what is your workflow that it requires more than 2 external monitors? Pro video?

A lot of people use three screens. I don’t, I use one, but people do.

One screen for intellij, one screen for tests, one screen for browser or email, for instance

Amateur video and full-stack software dev were the times I really appreciated having 3 monitors, running tons of things at once that all interact with each other.

Nowadays with my big corp SWE job, things outside my control make my workflow a lot slower, and I don't benefit from using more than just 1 screen. I work on multiple things at once, but they're totally separate, so I tab between them on my laptop.

> Plus they are nerfing the desktops by only offering the all-in-ones with m2

I'm confused by this statement. The iMacs leapfrogged M2. The new models shipping next month will have regular M3 chips, replacing M1 models.

sorry, it's a typo and it won't let me edit it now. I meant that they only desktop they upgrade to m3 is the iMac and all the other desktops are thousands of dollars with the old processor... so like Mac Studio for $2,000 that I need to buy to power all my monitors now is using an old outdated processor.

You either have a very specific workload that justify replacing $2000+ devices each year with zero waiting margin...

...or you are vastly exaggerating by stating that a 8 month old device is an old outdated processor and that you can't wait 4 more months for the update.

Can I wait? Sure. But this is the whole problem with single source computing that suddenly we have to wait for the processor to be delivered in the form factor we would like until a single manufacturer chooses to give it to us and they could choose not to as the intel mac mini was not regularly updated or choose to spend thousands of dollars to purchase something that might be outdated in a four months.

Plus the entire reason why I have to spend so much money is because they didn't bother to put a few dollars in i/o parts to allow it to support more video outputs that their low end devices could easily drive, and they don't support third party drivers well enough that we can use displaylink.

displaylink works just fine with an M2 macbook, what was your experience with it?

I wouldn’t consider the M2 outdated. My studio is running the M2 Max and it takes a lot to make it sweat. Would the M3 be better? Sure. In some ways. Is the M2 bad? Not at all. This is the best computer I’ve ever used by a wide margin, and I expect to continue using it for a long time.

I would have hesitated to get an M2 with the M3 announced, but having used one now… I don’t care very much. It’s a bit like updating your iPhone every year. It’s like 5% better and in the scheme of things, it’s not worth worrying about.

The single external display driver can drive more than one display at resolutions at 4k or lower. You can daisychain two 4k monitors on a Mac that has only one external display driver when you use the Displaylink adapter (it’s a driver). It somehow internally reuses the same display output for both displays.

The USB-C can power one 6k or 2 4k monitors.

The HDMI port on M2 Pro and newer can power one 8k.

Thunderbolt docks too — with a single cable they can drive two 4k displays plus provide power to the laptop.

They really can't on plain (not Pro/Max) M1/M2/M3 chips. No matter what, these machines will only support one external display unless you go the (IMO kludgy) DisplayLink route. It's a hardware limitation and no matter what Thunderbolt dock you have it will not do it.

any experience with the displaylink driver? i always read that its a performance hog and comes with all kinds of issues. I'm running an m1 air and having daisychaining work properly would safe me from switching to an m1 pro + thunderbolt dock. I don't want to give up my single usb-c cable solution.

Displaylink really doesn't work well on a mac. Even with intel there was a time period where it flat out stopped working and currently when you connect it, it enables screen recording which doesn't allow you to use certain hdcp functions.

It's like Apple re-enabled displaylink, but only begrudingly after they didn't allow it for a few generations of the OS.

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