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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • Thank you for taking the time to reply, and for further sharing your expertise to our conversation! I understand different resolutions, that the docking station has its own chipset, and why the Plugable is more expensive than other docking stations as a result. I now have a more nuanced understanding of frame-buffers and how DisplayLink interfaces with an OS like MacOS.

    Allow me to clarify the point I tried to make (and admittedly, I didn’t do a good job of expressing it previously). Rather than focusing on the technical specs, I had intended to have a more general conversation about design decisions and Apple’s philosophy. They know that consumers will want to hook up a base tier MacBook Air to two external displays, and intentionally chose not to build-in an additional frame-buffer to force users to spend more. I sincerely doubt there’s any cost-saving for the customer because Apple doesn’t include that out of the box.

    Apple’s philosophy has always been that they know what’s best for their users. If a 2020 M1 MacBook Air supports both the internal 2K display and a single external 6K display, that suggests to me it should have the horsepower to drive two external 1080p displays (that’s just a feeling I have, not a known fact). And I’ll acknowledge that Apple has improved this limitation for the newer MBAs, which allow you to disable the built-in display and use two external displays.

    My broader point is that Apple “knows what’s best” for their users: they want customers to buy an Apple display rather than to just stick with the 1080p LCDs they already own, because they’re not Retina®. Which do you honestly think is a more common use-case for a MacBook Air user: wanting to connect to two monitors (home office, University classroom system, numerous board room settings I’ve worked in, etc), or to connect their $1200 MBA to a $1600-$2300+ Studio Display? For that, anyone with an iota of common sense would be using a MBP etc since they’re likely a creative professional who would want the additional compute and graphics power for photo/video-editing, etc.

    I don’t disagree with your explanation of the thought-process behind why Apple may have made this hardware decision for MBAs, but it is effectively an arbitrary, non cost-saving decision that will certainly impede customers who expect two displays to just work, since they can do that on their 10-year-old Toshiba Satellite or w/e.

    Thanks, and have a great day


  • TIL, thanks! 🌝

    I use a Plugable docking station with DisplayLink with a base-level M1 MacBook Air and it handles multiple (3x 1080p) displays perfectly. My (limited) understanding is that they do that just using a driver. So at a basic level, couldn’t Apple include driver support for multiple monitors natively, seeing as it has adequate bandwidth in practice?






  • ditty@lemm.eetolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldme🦊irl
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    3 months ago

    I use Linux because when I encounter an issue there are numerous helpful forum posts and KB articles that cover it, even for really uncommon glitches. Whereas on Windows for even slightly obtuse errors, you just get the same base-level troubleshooting suggestions and AI listicles. Windows obscures actual useful information from end users which makes troubleshooting issues harder.