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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Bingo. I just set up a dual monitor and dock setup for my laptop in our home office. It dawned on me that my wife could get some use out of it, so I plugged it in. Come to find out, her MacBook Pro only supports a single external monitor. To do two external monitors, she'd have to upgrade to an entirely different and obviously more expensive MacBook. Dafuq? My almost 15 year old Sony laptop can do that ffs. Fucking boners.
I know there are software hacks I can do to enable the functionality, but that's asinine for a $1700 laptop. Guaranteed if I dual booted Linux on it the problem would magically disappear.
unfortunately not since its a hardware limitation
probably a cruft from the iPhone/iPad era since the first ARM desktop chips from Apple are basically beefed up phone chips which don't need more than one external monitor
anyway it is pretty stupid to ship a laptop with that limitation in this century
While I haven't tried, there are software circumventions on osx that bypass that limitation, so I can all but guarantee it would likely be a non-issue on any given Linux distro
Apple's design revolves around devices "always" working. Dual externals probably has the potential to run like shit with heavy cpu loads. So they limit it to one where it's "promised" to operate well. It's why peripherals have to meet certain standards and have a license to pair to apple products, they have to work as Apple expects. Apple is afraid people will overextend resources and buy shitty peripherals and then say their apple is a piece of shit. So, their factor of safety is excessive. It helps foster the whole "apple just works" mentality, promoting its clean UI and smooth operation. It's for common folk, people of the land, you know... Morons.
And things still run like shit anyway, especially when navigating proprietarianism hell
No they aren't, they want to sell you and me more stuff. It's the way it's always been. We're just the pleebs giving them our money.
That's the goal, yes, by way of making the gen pop think apple is doing them a favor by providing a worry-free environment
This is what they tell us, yes. It is not what reality reflects
My 2010 Lenovo X series can run dual monitors with no problem. On any OS.
No, apple intentionally handicapped this capability, which is available via USB on my 5 year old laptops.
Nah I fully get where you're coming from, but locking out users is a cop out. Considering Apple's M-series chips being "system-on-chips" integrating the CPU, GPU, RAM, and more, I can slightly understand limitations with someone trying to do dual monitor video rendering or 3d modeling overloading the chip and crashing the system on lower end chips. But even then, there could easily be a software mechanism that disallows such use when loads are too high as well as a warning to the user by way of a pop up prompt. Modern monitors using display port via thunderbolt and USB C while claiming the chip can't handle it is such a silly restriction when 3rd party software can mitigate it. Like I understand to an extent that they've made computing easy for the technologically uneducated and illiterate, but given their track record with other business decisions, this seems like more of just another "we like money" scenario instead of protect grandma.
Awesome username btw
You don't need additional monitors to overload the GPU you can do that with compute code alone, no actual graphics needed much less outputting graphics.
Also it's not terribly hard to prioritise scheduling such that certain aspects of the system remain responsive no matter how high the load, do that until you kill the resource-hungry process for exceeding hard limits and then display a popup sending the user to the apple store to buy an even stronger machine that's even more overpriced. There, done. That still wouldn't be a Mac I'd buy, but it'd be an Apple I'd respect, none of this "things are better when they're worse" kind of gaslighting. That includes thinness of devices, btw, modern Apple laptops are severely crippled by their atrocious thermals, the beefiest CPU doesn't do you any good if you can't dissipate even half of the heat it produces, when you can run all cores at full tilt for a full half a second before it has to throttle to a crawl to not melt itself.
Sidenote: Can OSX maximise windows nowadays? Did they get around to implementing it?
Don't worry, you can buy a program to accomplish everything they forgot to put in the OS...
Seriously though, the M series hardware is impressive, but it's not like apple software is actually more reliable. I'm running Ableton Live on an M1 air, and while it performs much better than on windows, it crashes exactly the same if you happen to choose the wrong order of operations. At least on windows you can choose "wait for this program to respond" - on mac you're going straight to desktop.