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Comment by ramijames | Hacker News Reader

The fact that I can't connect more than one monitor to my M1-based iMac is a fucking travesty.

It must be to have posted the same comment twice.

Did you do any research in to it before buying it? Apple was never misleading about how many monitors it could support. The "Tech Specs" product page says it can power its internal display and one extra external one. Just because you want it to do something doesn't make it a travesty when it can't.

When my current CTO at Merkle Science told me that employees got M1 MacBook Pros, I politely asked for a ThinkPad instead. He obliged, winning me over. I was the only employee using Ubuntu for a while. Today I use my ThinkPad P14S AMD Ryzen 7 5600 in a 4 display setup. It is beautiful and I use it with qtile. While I can work with 2 displays, I'd rather have both be external displays than have to use mismatched displays. I used to use my Macbook 2018 that way at Visa. However I loathed that machine because of how many problems I faced with it and how mental the USB C hell was. Having to use istatmenu to turn on the fans manually at full speed was unacceptable. Having to only use ports on the left or right side was unacceptable.

I don't ever want to use a macbook ever again. I am certain I will have to since many tech Bros think that it is the best experience out there, and the alternative is Windows which is even worse. I hope every company realizes giving your developers the machine or the OS of their choice is not a bad thing. Stop forcing Devs to use X just because your IT is saying so. Let the developers do their jobs in the best possible way.

Were you expecting to be able? The tech specs say "One external display".

Not sure this is fair to the consumer. Apple was advertising usb-c as one port to rule then all. When the device has two of these ports, why should the user expect not to connect two displays?

Especially since this restriction didn’t apply to the previous models that looked exactly the same and are now advertised as less powerful.

It would be natural to not explicitly look for how many displays it can handle.

Back in 2011 you could use a second iMac is a monitor in target display mode, that went away, why should the user expect not to be able to use target display mode for every iMac? Things change unfortunately and the single display restriction of M1 was advertised heavily online and can be a pain point but it's listed online as a spec.

Good point, though I’d argue more people use two screens on a MacBook than an iMac as a screen, since it already provides a computer.

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