Apple Still Hasn’t Solved One of Apple Silicon’s Biggest Flaws
The M2 chip does not provide a solution
The Cupertino giant has hit the jackpot by switching Macs from Intel processors to Apple’s Silicon solution. The new Macs have improved significantly for several reasons. Their performance has increased, and their power consumption has decreased.
Therefore, the new Apple computers are faster and more economical simultaneously, making them the perfect companions for travel and home. On the other hand, the switch to a different platform has taken its toll. Apple Silicon’s biggest shortcoming is said to be app compatibility.
To use the full potential of these Macs, individual programs must be optimized for the new platform, which their developers must take care of. Fortunately, the high demand for these Macs drives developers towards the necessary optimization.
However, there is another major drawback — Macs with the so-called base chip can only connect one external display (up to two in the case of the Mac mini).
The second generation does not provide a solution either
At first, it was expected that this would be purely a problem related to the first pilot generation. After all, it was more or less expected that with the arrival of the M2 chip, we would see a major improvement that would allow Macs to handle more than one external display.
The more advanced M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips are not so severely limited. For example, a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max chip can handle up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one display with up to 4K resolution. However, the recently unveiled MacBook Air (M2) and 13″ MacBook Pro (M2) laptops convinced us otherwise — there’s no improvement for Macs with the base chips.
In this respect, these Macs are limited similarly to other Macs with M1. Specifically, they can only handle a single monitor with a resolution of up to 6K at 60 Hz. Therefore, the question remains whether and when we will see a possible change. Many users would like to connect at least two monitors, which is impossible with basic Apple computers.
Available solutions
Despite this shortcoming, there is still a solution for connecting several external displays simultaneously. Ruslan Tulupov pointed this out when testing M1 Macs. He connected 6 displays on the Mac mini (2020) and 5 external screens on the MacBook Air (2020).
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, and you can’t do without the necessary accessories in this case. As Tulupov showed in his YouTube video, the basis for getting it working was a Thunderbolt 3 dock combined with several other adapters and DisplayLink reducers.
Unfortunately, if you tried to connect the monitors directly and used the available connectors on the Mac, you wouldn’t be able to. As we mentioned above, it remains unclear when we’ll see the arrival of support for connecting multiple external displays. Would you welcome this change, or are you happy with the ability to connect just one monitor?
Concluding remarks
The problem is probably not so much with the chipset itself but with its drivers. However, a basic MacBook Air or Pro doesn’t quite qualify as a professional machine at the moment; Apple has other more powerful machines on offer for that.
So maybe the whole thing is about Apple simply thinking there’s no need to add native support for more than one external monitor for undemanding users. I’d rather like the option of using MST (Multi-Stream Transport), where a single cable runs from the MacBook, and then monitors can be daisy chained using a Display Port cable.
Interestingly, when using dual-boot on older MacBooks with Intel, everything works beautifully, but not from macOS. This is why I think everything will be locked down to software only. Sadly, this shortcoming is currently present with MacBook pros in high configurations. Apple should work on this further.
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Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq_FyjcAULA
