Hacker News Reader

Comment by Detrytus | Hacker News Reader

And yet it's a dick move from Apple to artificially limit number of external screens supported.

They are not artificially limiting the number of external screens. To support more screens, they would have to reserve die area for an additional controller. That could mean a gpu less or something. This is about engineering tradeoffs.

Considering the M3 has 55% more transistors than the M1, I'm sure they could have found some room for a third display controller, or a more capable one (one with MST support for instance), or just a more flexible one.

They're selling a $1600 machine which can't drive two external displays, it's sad. Intel's HD Graphics have been doing better since 2012 and they're trash.

> considering the M3 has 55% more transistors than the M1

And that's why everyone loves node shrinks. You can stuff more transistors for the same cost.

It’s a business decision. You don’t think Apple knows the demand for multiple external displays? If they thought it would sell more Macs, they would do it.

> It’s a business decision.

That doesn't make it less frustrating.

> If they thought it would sell more Macs, they would do it.

It's short term thinking, it generates bad feeling of nickel and diming and unnecessary upsells: on M3 you need to pay $2000 to be able to use two external displays, and $3200 for 3, even if you have no need for the rest of the processing power.

Not only that but they managed to create more range confusion with the expensive but gimped entry-level 14".

What you describe is only considered by a vanishingly small number of their customers. The vast majority don’t care or even own an external display. You could be right about range confusion, but I doubt it simply because, like everything else, Apple is so disciplined about market research. Time will tell

> The vast majority don’t care or even own an external display.

Or more than 1 external display. The vast majority own none or a single. Few people have multiples, and those people are generally enthusiasts who will also tend to pay more.

I'm curious where people are getting this data point?

Fair point. It's a bit anecdotal and things I've read over the years. Multi-monitor was growing quickly for desktops until the big wide screens came out. Then it seemed to slow. As many people shifted to laptops, the one larger monitor seemed to be more common or no monitor at all. There's also the challenge of defining multi-monitor as I use 3, but one of those is my laptop. In that sense nearly everyone can run 2 screens.

I'd love to see some modern stats that take into account these nuances.

You can say, "it's a business decision," about nearly anything that a business does. That's not really an argument for or against something.

Ofcourse it's a business decision but it's one a lot of people disagree with. How can you keep repeating 99.9% of the customers don't care when it's one of the most repeated complaints on places like this over and over again? It's a stupid decision that doesn't make sense.

Hi, in case you forgot, you’re on an HN forum. That’s why 99.999% of people do not care about most things people here care about. Get some perspective.

Engineering tradeoffs to support something intel/amd PCs have supported for 15+ years? Maybe apple is just shit at engineering?

Intel/AMD chips don't approach the efficiency of what Apple makes.

I don't understand this pretence that the vast majority of the time laptops are plugged into the power anyway.

There's always one reason after another. "It won't fit", you say sure it can, others do it, "Well, they don't do it efficiently", you say okay, how many times are you driving multiple monitors (most of which support power delivery these days) on battery, then it'll be "Apple just understands this better".

You're effectively saying that you want Apple to design a chip without any compromises in features, cost, performance, or efficiency.

Apple sure could design a chip that drives more monitors, but maybe they decided that making the chip x% more performance/efficient, or having y feature was more important.

Or, maybe this really truly is trivial and they decided to segment their chips by not including this feature. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps because until recently, battery life has sucked? I used to plug in my laptops all the time. Now with the M1, it only gets plugged in to charge, then I don't plug it in until I charge it again. I have been enjoying sitting on my couch when I want to, to get work done rather than at my desk.

You can sit on the couch and have your laptop plugged in. I also don't keep my lenovo plugged in all the time and don't notice any battery issues. Realistically you're not sitting on a couch, working for 6 hours straight either.

It’s not just battery life, it’s heat and noise too. Yeah I know not a lot of people actually use laptops on laps (though I do), but you typically can’t hide it under a desk like you can with a desktop.

My job provided me with a Dell laptop with an i7 and it can keep my coffee warm just idling. Sometimes, when it’s decided it doesn’t want to sleep, I can hear the fans from the next room. While the screen is off, not being touched.

I could go on at length about just how shitty the Dell is compared to my MacBook Air (despite costing more and performing worse!), but Apple Silicon Macs are just so much nicer when it comes to the practicalities of using a portal computer.

So this conversion goes from Apple shouldn't need more display controllers since most people Air users don't use more displays to most people don't use their laptop on battery but power usage should be a major concern.

It's almost like we should focus on what Apple does best and ignore what Apple does worse.

True. But when I was going to customer sites, it was really nice to plug in my MacBook Pro the night before and not have to think about battery life. It’s also nice not to have the fans going constantly and being able to work with it on my lap without the fear of never being able to have little Scarface’s.

Have you ever actually tried driving decent large monitors from those crappy intel chips?

I have.

Engineering tradeoffs indeed.

For all its flaws, Apple focuses on making sure there is a good experience overall. In general, they'd rather have a more limited hardware ecosystem that works better than a broad ecosystem that's flaky.

There are tradeoffs to both approaches. I go back and forth between windows and mac, and have for decades.

I was a surfacebook/win10/WSL guy for a few years, and liked it a lot. Win 11? Not so much.

Currently the M series chips blows any PC laptop away for the combination of portability/performance/battery.

The Snapdragon X might change that in the next couple years, and I'll take a look at switching back then, and see what win 12 offers. If MS decides to take a step back from being an ad-serving platform and goes back to focusing on productivity, I may switch back.

For now though, I'm planning on accepting the gut punch to my wallet and picking up a 14" M3 Max in a few weeks.

> Have you ever actually tried driving decent large monitors from those crappy intel chips?

Yes, I regularly drive my monitors with 1 intel laptop and/or 1 amd laptop (modern ones, linux). Not a single issue ever. I plug in my work m2 pro mac to these same monitors - constant issues.

> For all its flaws, Apple focuses on making sure there is a good experience overall.

MacOS has had dozens of well-know, well-documented bugs for years that haven't been addressed, many of them mentioned in this thread. I don't see any focus from Apple on these whatsoever - their main focus seems to be advertising and visual design.

I have done dual external monitor setup for years on Intel and AMD laptops without any issues.

The standard setup at my company is a ThinkPad connected to dual 27" monitor. My company has thousand of employees. (Mac setup is also available for those who requests.) Many many companies offer a similar setup for employees.

Maybe you need a reality check first.

> Maybe you need a reality check first.

Thanks for the kindness, I had my first laptop (PC) in the mid 80s, and have been writing software on various hardware configurations for 30 years, so maybe I just need a bit more reality I guess?

> The standard setup at my company is a ThinkPad connected to dual 27" monitors

No one claimed that dual monitors isn't possible.

Running two 4k large, high quality monitors off a low-end Intel integrated video controller at 120hz is going to be harder.

Apple is focused on higher-end experience, always has been. They're not a great choice if you're looking for standard enterprise arrangements.

You can go into pretty much any bank or office and see the kinds of setups that you're talking about.

You can also see the flicker and wince at the eye-strain.

This is a silly discussion.

> I had my first laptop (PC) in the mid 80s, and have been writing software on various hardware configurations for 30 years, so maybe I just need a bit more reality I guess?

Yes, sounds like you've been drinking apple koolaid and fanboying over bullshit for 40 years.

> This is a silly discussion.

What's silly is reading through comments of multiple people discussing actual issues they face with macs, completely ignoring what's said, and then claiming 'apple is focused on higher-end experience' based on nothing but your own anecdotal experience and imagination.

> Yes, sounds like you've been drinking apple koolaid and fanboying over bullshit for 40 years

I mentioned that I switch back and forth between PC and Mac, depending on what's better at the time - so you're pretty far off the mark.

Regardless, why are you responding with such anger and venom?

> What's silly is ...

I'd like to suggest that you take a moment to reflect on how you treat others. Even a stranger online.

I notice that your account is 59 days old, so maybe you're new to the HN community.

This community frowns on personal attacks, we try to focus on comments that are informative and add to the discussion.

I recommend reviewing the comment guidelines [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Regardless, why are you responding with such anger and venom?

Any 'anger and venom' is completely imagined by you.

> This community frowns on personal attacks,

Really? What personal attacks? Please point out exactly where I've personally attacked you.

> we try to focus on comments that are informative and add to the discussion.

You mean like your comments in this chain? Where you dismiss the entire conversation as 'silly', based on nothing but your own personal, anecdotal experience? If it's silly, no need to participate. Your comments are rude, condescending and add nothing of substance to the discussion.

@dang - wubrr is a newish account, I've reviewed their other comments/threads and they all seem fine, if a bit inflammatory. This one is off the rails though. I'll stop participating. Probably best if this whole thread is deleted (starting with my original comment), it adds no value.

Are you like an aspiring moderator? Nobody asked you to review anyone's comments or comment on anything.

Save this petty nonsense for reddit.

Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is.

It is Apple’s best selling computer by quite a bit. They sell metric assloads of the $999 base model each fall when school starts.

IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price.

> Lots of compromises are made to get the Air to the size, weight, and most importantly, price point (ie sub-$1k) that it is.

> IMO the $999 one (or $899 with education discount) is literally the best price:perf ratio of any computer available today or at any time in my recent memory. It’s astounding how good it is for that price.

It is possible for your comment to be correct while the poster above is also correct. The M chips are amazing, but let's not pretend that Apple doesn't knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions.

"But that would make it more expensive."

Yes it would... by pennies. It is a bit ridiculous to sell a phone as expensive as the current iphones and limit them to USB 2.

Generally speaking, people don’t use the port on an iPhone for anything other than charging. The fact that it supports USB v-anything is mostly unnecessary cost.

If you are thinking in any way whatsoever about the non-wireless data transfer speeds on your phone, you are not the market or user it was designed for. Same goes for external monitors on an MBA.

I agree that USB isn't commonly used but that's kinda the point - it doesn't hurt apple much to do it (and they're not saving anything remotely significant), but they still do it to force the few who do want to use fast USBs. A more common example where nearly everyone would notice would be the abysmal ram in their phones until very recently.

> knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions.

I'm skeptical. A ton of money is dumped into optimizing everything and then they just throw it down the drain? That would drive more people to the competition than to higher-priced Macs.

I meant that bit in general and not specifically for the mac, but for eg they sold iPads with 32gb storage as recently as 2020 iirc. Even now the base level macs have much less ram and storage than similarly priced windows counterparts. I think part of it is just so they can say "macbooks start at $xx!". There are more examples I can't think of right now.

Come off it.

- the 14" M3 is $1600, but limited to a single external display, and actually only has two TB ports, it's just sad

- the M3 Pro is limited to two external displays, despite an entry price of $2000

$3199 is the baseline to be able to use 3 external displays (although at that price you can plug up to 4).

the 2000 Euro M3 Macbook pro also supports only one external display and is the same size and weight as the ones that support more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com