Ask HN: How on earth are you using your Apple computer with external displays?

I own four different Apple computers — a 2017 MacBook Pro, an M1 MacBook Air, an M1 MacBook Pro, and most recently a maxed out Mac Studio. I also have had in that timespan three different Windows desktops that I have built and a ThinkPad running Windows or Linux depending on the mood.

I have spent countless dollars on cables and adapters in an attempt to find the magic combination. I have read DisplayPort specs, I know every brand of certified cable. I now know way more than I would ever care to know about DisplayPort and HDMI protocols. I have tried 4 different brands and models of monitor. For one of those models, I had three of the exact same model. All combinations work flawlessly with anything that is not one of the Apple devices. I have all but eliminated any of these components being the problem.

Depending on the device and the day I will get:

– Visual artifacts like snow, lines, flickering

– Failure to support native resolution on any high resolution monitors

– Failure to support high refresh rates

– Forced scaling, detecting monitor as a TV and using interlacing

– Most reliably of all, failure to wake from sleep without plugging/unplugging; doing a dance with power cycling my monitor or device until it finally works, or just giving up and logging into my Windows PC because today I can’t use my Apple computer

It’s never all at once, but it’s always at least one thing. In the time of owning any of these devices, I have without exaggeration, not once had the expected experience of sitting down at my desk and starting my day without fighting my computer to work properly with my monitor.

Searching the internet, I can’t be alone. All of the problems I have, as far as I can tell, other people experience. And as far as I can tell, no one has an answer. I’m at a breaking point after ordering this $4k desktop Mac Studio and waiting 3 months for it to arrive. I hoped that, being a device that requires an external display, they at least worked it out with this one.

They did not.

So how does the entire professional industry working with Apple computers manage to start their day, every day, like this? Am I insane? Is no one else dealing with this? Are you all just using the built in display? This has been going on for YEARS for me, across multiple generations of devices.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31886907

Points: 11

# Comments: 7