Duet Display – Ex-Apple Engineers Turn Your iPad into an Extra Display

Pros:

- Simple to use. Install the drivers on Mac, run the program on your iPad, and go.

- Acts like any another monitor. You can adjust orientation with other monitors and resolution. Different choices in performance. Adjust vertical orientation on iPad and screen just updates.

- Very responsive, if not always very performant. No lag or jitter in image/sound, but graphics performance can be slower (lower FPS). You can play video games on it, but I wouldn't do it for a living.

- Sometimes you just want to sit down in a coffee shop and have a second monitor handy. This does that.

- Touch screen triggers mouse input, if that's useful for you.

Cons:

- Your CPU is doing all the graphic card duty. On my i7 at retina resolution, you'll chew 50% of a core. This will eat battery and your machine will run warm. But not hot, like a video game.

- Odd graphic issues when you also have a secondary monitor plugged in through HTML. Works just fine, in general, but sometimes it will loose track of what to refresh or update on the monitors. Disconnecting and reconnecting always clears this up. Most often happens when I lock the computer.

- Sometimes, it just gets confused about connecting. Again, stop and restart the app on iPad fixes it.

It's not perfect, but it works well enough that I certainly don't regret getting it.

But who were they at Apple and what did they do there ? Does Apple endorse them in some fashion, do they have privilege access to some technologies ? In what fashion is that relevant ? Outside that branding, there is nothing in there that back that claim with anything concrete.

There is nothing wrong and the application can be indeed great, but this marketing tactic raises all my alarms. Without the positive comments here on HN, I would not even have considered trying that product at all.

You can now use other Windows 10 PCs as wireless displays and project to them in any display configuration as long as they're on the same local network. It can also reroute audio output from the host to projected PCs, and even reroute input (mouse, keyboard, touchpad, touchscreen(!), pen(!), etc) from projected PCs back to the host.

From my experience so far it has worked impeccably well. There is a bit of input lag and the occasional compression artifact, so hardcore gaming is definitely out of the question, but it's more than good enough for regular media consumption and browsing.

I really can't wait to see something like this land in more OSes.

I found that there is a noticeable latency for older iDevices with 30-pin connectors. This latency seemed to disappear when I substituted a current iPad Air 2.

Just something to keep in mind for anyone interested in using Duet.

I've got a pile of old iPads that would be nice to resurrect as displays. I downloaded the Mac app but balked and left at the double-digit price. (not to mention the unknown in-app purchase)

Downloading now...anxiously had to ask, since the download is 129 MB!

Everyday I wake up there is some new tech I was wishing for yesterday ;)

Does Duet do any better?

To test reboot. Run Duet. Start Chrome. Go to google maps. Your machine should start in integrated GPU mode then switch to discrete. Close the maps tab and a few moments later it will switch back to integrated. Each of those switched is usually seemless but with Air Display was janky in the same way some monitors are janky when switching resolutions. Curious if Duet had the same issue

A decade later achieving a similar thing using more recent technology is so difficult that it is noteworthy.

I dont have a point. It just seemed an interesting comparison.