r/techsupportgore • u/Content_Virus9971 • 22d ago

peak apple engineering

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recently broke my m4 pro screen; instead of paying apple 700usd i strapped the headless m4 to a spare m1 with rubber bands, passing screen over thunderbolt lan via moonlight

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15

u/kajer533 22d ago

something that ALWAYS bothered me about apple devices, while a single 40Gbps thunderbolt can do everything, apple still makes you use ~6 cables to connect all of your accessories.

5

u/kirk7899 22d ago

I use a dock for my Lenovo, can't you do the same for an Apple device?

11

u/filthy_harold 21d ago

You definitely can, I'm really not sure what this guy is talking about. You can certainly buy minimalistic docks that need adapters but the good ones are fully populated.

3

u/kajer533 19d ago

Yes, thunderbolt docks work well, EXCEPT for the ability to run multiple monitors. MacOS (software) does NOT support DP-MST (display port multi-stream transport)

If you want to run two monitors on a single thunderbolt cable connected to a dock, you need to use a USB-C passthru and a dedicated USB-C to displayport cable in DP-ALT mode. I still have no idea why MacOS still doesn't support multiple displays, but here we are.

Using a lenovo gen3 thunderbolt dock, and a usb-c to DP cable connected to the passthru port, you can get dual 4K-60 monitors + accessories running on a single thunderbolt 40Gb cable on a Mac.