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Comment by sandstrom | Hacker News Reader

Will this computer finally support daisy-chaining? Also known as Multi-Stream Transport (MST), it's from the DisplayPort 1.2 spec.

It's the ability to connecting two displays via one cable.

Any 5+ year old PC has support for it. But your $3,000 Macbook Pro doesn't.

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As an alternative to this, you can grab a thunderbolt dock. You can input 2/3 monitors into this, and all your other peripherals - then one cable into your macbook.

My Caldigit TS4 charges my macbook at 90W, has 2 x 27" monitors running at 120hz (i could go higher but i can't perceive the difference so i'll save the bandwidth), has 2 external drives and can read my SD card to import photos. The thing has so many ports and if you have lots of peripherals it doesn't matter how many ports your laptop has as you'll not want to bother plugging them in and out if you move around a lot (I do). I can't rate the TS4 highly enough.

Maybe I'm being a bit sensitive to price, but $400 seems pretty expensive. Do you know of any cheaper alternatives?

HP Thunderbolt docks are way cheap on ebay because of enterprise e-waste. Thats where I got my HP Thunderbolt G2.

I use a thinkpad USB-C dock on my M1 Max MBP. My only complaint is that the displays do not work with FileVault. Apparently the driver will not load until the boot volume is decrypted.

It would be nice if apple made a good, trusted docking station that just works with their laptops.

I spent months researching these docks to be sure it fit my needs. You can get cheaper if it’s not thunderbolt, or has less ports or don’t want power via the cable, or don’t want to drive your monitors at a higher refresh rate.

Or just buy the TS4 and you never have to worry. It’s by far the best reviewed and reliable.

I have M1 Max Macbook Pro and two monitors daisy chained. Mbook -> OWC TB4 hub -> BenQ 3220U -> TB to DP => Dell 2718Q

-> are TB cables => is DP (Display Port)

OWC hub is optional, scheme works without it the same. I use the hub to connect also external 10G network and a card reader.

NB: not an advice to buy BenQ PD3220U, see this: https://www.reddit.com/r/BenQ/comments/qsmvn2/pd3220u_kvm_bu... No solution so far. BenQ thinks it's the Apple bug, Apple probably thinks something, but doesn't tell.

Probably not. Last I looked into it, it seemed like a driver issue, where macOS chooses to setup the MST screen as a mirror of the other MST display instead of a separate display.

Well the OS level support for multiple monitors us essentially user-hostile so not sure why you would try this anyway. I gave up on dual monitors as soon as Ultrawides became available and my Mac life is better for it.

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