Developer's dream come true: New MacBook Airs now support two external displays | Hacker News Reader

Developer's dream come true: New MacBook Airs now support two external displays

9to5mac.com

40 pointsgaborcselle60 comments

This is a pretty big deal for designers and developers who love dual-display setups, e.g. for looking at code and docs at the same time. Until now you had to lug around a 15" MacBook Pro to get dual external monitor support.

Or use something other than a MacBook. That's an option too.

The vast majority of developers I know use some version of the MacBook. (However, that could be the San Francisco / New York tech bubble that I live in.)

Anecdotes are generally worse than meaningless. Still, in the spirit of things, I don't think I know a single MacBook user; sampling biases clearly exist.

Tangentally: One is inclined to wonder, if dual display support is such a big deal, why they all use hardware incapable of it.

do your developer friends use linux laptops, or windows running linux vm?

One MacBook to rule them all

I don't understand the allure of the laptop for developers.

For me, performance easily beats portability. I also have a laptop, but I'd never use it as a primary desktop.

I run my own company and have a home office and a regular office, each with a mouse, keyboard, and big monitor. With my laptop I can just take it back and forth - all files come with me and the machine is in the exact state when I boot it up at home as when it was at the office.

If I need to go out of town, I just take the laptop with me and I can do everything I would normally do, just with a smaller screen.

At least for web development, speed usually isn't an issue ... putting in an SSD drive a year or so ago, though, was the best thing I did - very noticeable speed increase!

So, for me it's a convenience factor.

Are there ultrabooks with dual monitor support? It seems to me that the graphics hardware is the limit (and all ultrabooks use the same one).

It's fallacious to assume that the majority, or even a sizable proportion of, developers use a portable device of any kind as their primary machine.

Sure, be the topic of the discussion were developers who do.

What makes you think that? So far the groups of developers that have been called out are "Developers" and "Developers who love dual-display setups." I don't see anything about mobile devices except that gaborcselle seems to think [almost] everybody uses MacBooks, which is the point I'm questioning.

I think it’s pretty clear from the context that developers who would like to use a MBA were meant.

But then, instead of lugging around a heavy/bulky MBP, you're lugging around a heavy/bulky PC laptop. Problem not solved.

Or use Plugable's UGA-2K-A USB to VGA/DVI/HDMI adapters for Multiple Monitors. I've been running three external 1920x1200's off my MacBook Air. http://twitpic.com/9yr3tr/full Not Thunderbolt nor 2,560x1,440, yet multiple monitors nonetheless.

That's a lot of pixels with integrated graphics :) (IRRC). Don't you find the brightness from the 2nd/3rd displays causes eye strain?

It's a USB video adapter if I'm reading the product page right

http://plugable.com/products/uga-2k-a/

So where are the affordable Thunderbolt displays? Will they even exist for this generation of tech?

I would imagine that there are converters to DVI/HDMI.... I hope?

You can't daisy chain pretend thunderbolt ports aka converters. So 1 monitor max.

I believe the only way to get two displays working though is to pass the second display through the first display (via thunderbolt). AFAIK, there is no adapter to split thunderbolt into two DVI/VGA/HDMI cables. Though I hope I'm wrong, I'd buy that in a flash and wire up my second external display to my new air.

There are, no worries

Monoprice has this:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=101&c...

It doesn't support chaining more thunderbolt devices, though.

All this does is split the video into 2 identical signals. Note their fine print: "the two outputs of this monitor will always be the same"

I had no idea people paid ~$1000 for a computer display, let alone buy more than one.

Displays from Dell that rival this in quality are not even $100 less, and don't have the docking powers that a Thunderbolt display offers. I've got a bound pair of cables (power+thunderbolt) that plug into my laptop and all of the sudden my backup drives, both monitors, ethernet and USB hub are connected. The Dell 27" higher-than-1080p monitor is nice, but it can't do all of that sadly.

Unfortunately, the industry pretty much decided that 1080p is all they are going to support. Nowadays, it is pretty hard to find anything above 23" with a decent resolution. Most of the market is now taken by monitor/TV devices, with crappy resolutions (1080p is crappy with a 27" screen).

Find me a big monitor that has a decent resolution and uses a good panel and is significantly cheaper than an Apple display, and I'm going to buy one right now. Maybe two.

Supposedly this is the same panel as Apple: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5885/the-achieva-shimian-qh270...

Nice catch. At that price point, it is worth a try.

it's amazing how much cheaper a monitor is when you go from 2560 res to 1920 res -- the price is less than half the cost. The usual run of the mill 1920x1080 display goes for $300 or so. I'm guessing the reason for the price differential is that the 1080p monitors are mass produced compared to these expensive 27" 2560res displays.

IPS vs TFT. Most 1080p monitors are a lower quality display to begin with. Viewing angles and color accuracy, light bleed, etc. The fact that 2560x1440 has 75% more pixels than a 1080p monitor is another contributor to cost.

Most 2560 monitors are overpriced especially the Apple Cinema. I bought a 27" 2560x1440 IPS monitor from Korea just for $360 bucks back in january and it's perfect for this price, I still had to bought a Mini Display Port to DVI adapter for my Macbook, but even with adapter it much cheaper than ACD and doesn't have this huge reflective glass.

But yeah, it wouldn't work if you want to chain you monitors. so if you want two monitors for your macbook - at least one of them must be ACD

A mini display port to DVI adapter is $30. You could get fully fitted out with three external screens + adapters and cables for under $600.

Thunderbolt and mini display ports aren't the same thing. Although they use the same connection type, thunderbolt has additional features which allow it to transfer far, far more data. It also lets you chain devices together, which is going to be needed for all of those devices. You can't just slap the DVI adaptor and hope it'll work- especially if you need to chain the devices together to support all of them.

I manage 80 Macs at my company. Half of them have Thunderbolt ports. All of them use mini-displayport-to-DVI adaptors, and some of them are daisy-chained together with other thunderbolt devices.

If you have other Thunderbolt devices, just "slap the DVI adapter" on the end of the chain. You don't have to "hope it'll work". It's how the damn thing is designed!

Go back and study what a Thunderbolt port is, and stop downvoting people in ignorance.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/09/16/apple-thunderbolt-displa...

http://www.macworld.com/article/1162365/first_look_apple_thu...

Thunderbolt supports DMA pretty much unrestricted iirc so it's a stupid standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack

http://www.breaknenter.org/2012/02/adventures-with-daisy-in-...

Wow, that looks amazing. Forgive my ignorance (I don't use external displays with my MBP), but how is this done? Does each display connect to the next display with Thunderbolt daisy chaining?

Exactly, the thunderbolt displays have outputs that you can daisy chain with.

The new MBP has two Thunderbolt ports and an HDMI output so I assume it's just using each output separately. Not sure about the Air though....

I've been running two external displays for some time on my MBP. One mini display port, one USB. The USB has a mostly negligible lag.

I've been doing the same and the lag isn't the issue. The real problem is high CPU usage. I can only use the usb monitor for looking at text, anything more (like opening a webpage or watching a video in youtube) and the computer slows to a crawl (I'm using the first unibody macbook pro, pre-thunderbolt).

Do the displays have to be Thunderbolt displays? Seems really expensive.

I'm no expert, but I wonder if you could go:

Air->Thunderbolt Dispaly->DVI Adapter->DVI display ?

The way I see it, you can't daisy chain without having at least one thunderbolt display.

Unfortunately no. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5219#dispnum

Thunderbolt only chains to Thunderbolt. But the port coming out of the Mac will gladly connect to one of anything.

Actually, yes you can, as long as your Mac supports multiple external displays.

The only thing you can't do is plug a mini-displayport adapter directly into a Thunderbolt display. But, strangly, you can chain, say, a hard drive to a Thunderbolt display, and then plug the mini-displayport adapter into the hard drive, and that will work.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1162365/first_look_apple_thu...

Negatory. The Thunderbolt port is really just passing through a DisplayPort signal - any DisplayPort monitor will do.

Displayport degrades nicely into HDMI, DVI, or VGA with an adapter, so sky's pretty much the limit.

The new MacBook Pro does also have a HDMI port which can do all the same.

I didn't know that.

Since I have Cinema Display with DisplayPort, could I do MacBook Air > Thunderbolt > Cinema Display?

No sir. For (presumably) dumb (presumably) Apple Reasons, a non-Thunderbolt display cannot be involved in that chain at all.

I'm not sure why. This is not gospel, by the way - I don't know if this was a limitation of the prior MBAir or else the signalling scheme in play. 1-800-APL-CARE can clarify.

As I mentioned in another post, non-thunderbolt displays cannot interpret packet data. When you use a dvi to thunderbolt adapter, it's simply translating the pins, not decoding packets. Your laptop's thunderbolt chip would realize you're connecting a normal display and send the usual display signals rather than packet data.

If you put this normal display at the end of a thunderbolt daisy chain, it would be the responsibility of the last device on the chain to convert the video packets into signals, something I doubt intel would put into their specs, requiring all devices that implement lightpeak to also decode video.

I think adapters are sometimes bad in this regard, people will think if the adapter fits, it should work the way they think it should. Back in the day when parallel ports and scsi used the same 25pin connectors, lots of people destroyed devices thinking they could hook their hard drives to their parallel port.

No, but there's been some discussion at Ars that you can do MacBook Air > Thunderbolt Display > non-display device > Cinema Display.

Awesome. But you'd still need at least one Apple Display to chain the second one? Or are there ways to chain together two DisplayPort displays?

Ah, apologies, I was being a bit unclear.

The only way to daisy chain any series of displays anywhere in the Apple universe is by plugging Thunderbolt Display into a Thunderbolt Display into a Thunderbolt port. Daisy chaining is not being demonstrated in this post's picture.

(There is a limited and unsupported scenario where this not quite true, but it's not worth getting into.)

Given adapters, you can plug basically any display ever made into a Mac and expect it to work. But it's got to be going straight into the Mac.

(USB "DisplayLink" soft-displays break every one of these rules via special drivers)

Can the macbook pro retina handle 4 thunderbolt displays (2 on each port as with the Air) + HDMI?

Negatory. The total volume of pixels the Mac can push is the limiter. As you add monitors, the Mac will eventually black out the laptop display and spend the pixels externally. Beyond that it'll simply refuse to light up the display it can't feed. Doesn't matter which port they're headed out of.

Three sizeable displays appears to be the limit.

Note: A Thunderbolt display can pass along enough signal for another Thunderbolt display. But not two extra on the chain. And for (presumably) dumb (presumably) Apple Reasons, a non-Thunderbolt display cannot be involved in that chain at all.

tl;dr: give Apple all your money

probably not apple reasons since thunderbolt is really just intel's lightpeak spec. you probably can't chain a non-thunderbolt display at the end of the chain because the data packets are probably encoded with some device id, and if it doesn't match the current hardware, it would just forward it along the chain, so when these packets arrive at the non-lightpeak compliant display, it wouldn't be able to interpret it.

tl;dr: normal displays don't read packet data

This is a limitation of Apple's Thunderbolt display, not Thunderbolt itself.

Thunderbolt is designed to allow displayport at the end of a chain. For some reason, Apple chose not to support connecting a displayport adapter directly to a Thunderbolt display, but you can put a daisy-chained device in-between your Thunderbolt display and your displayport display, and it will work.

Rather presumptuous to imply that developers in general care about MacBook design tweaks, isn't it?

The hyperbole didn't sit well with me either.

Yeah, the title may be a little exaggerated, but most developers I know (including myself) have some version of the MacBook.

That's why I pulled the trigger and bought mine yesterday.

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