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Comment by tl | Hacker News Reader

Target Display Mode which turns iMacs into monitors is not supported on newer iMacs (anything post 2015):

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592

This sounds terrible for the consumers and for the environment as once the computer inside dies or is obsolete, you have to throw away a perfectly good display that could have a second life as an external monitor plugged into a more modern system since display technology doesn't go outdated as fast as computing.

As someone who finally bit the bullet and scrapped/curbed 2 old iMacs, yeah. It hurt a lot. Perfectly good, well-calibrated 21.5” and 27” monitors just reduced to paper weights. Plucked the ram/HDD’s and sent them on their way. I looked into every possible option for them. Such a waste.

Especially a waste since it's even the same panel as the one you're throwing away. Apple hasn't upgraded the 27" 5k for 8 years now, this new one included (lots of non-display upgrades like the camera and audio, sure, but the display itself hasn't changed)

27” 2.5K actually (should’ve specified). It was a mid-2011 iMac. The 21” was a 2009 (belonged to a sibling).

It's terrible. The original reason Apple dropped this feature was because there wasn't an external bus that could push that many pixels. But Thunderbolt can do it now. This reuse would be more meaningful than preconsumer recycling of aluminum.

I use https://astropad.com/product/lunadisplay/ to use my iPad or an old Mac's screen as a secondary screen and it's good.

Well this is upsetting. I just scrapped and curbed 2x iMacs like 2 months ago because they couldn’t do anything anymore. This would’ve been perfect.

Wouldn’t an obsolete computer still be perfectly fine for less demanding users? Average Joes, poor people, a kid’s first PC, etc. — give it away, I say.

Depends on how old. My sisters old iMac ran perfectly fine but couldn’t load 75% of the internet unfortunately and most of the apps couldn’t be updated past a 5-6 year old build.

"You can use more than one iMac as a display, if each iMac is using a Thunderbolt cable to connect directly to a Thunderbolt port on the other Mac (not the other iMac)."

Do Mac's not have USB ports? It's truly bizarre that you need 1 thunderbolt port per monitor. That's an incredible amount of wasted bandwidth.

How is a USB port from pre-2015 going to help you transmit a DisplayPort signal?

Good point.

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