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Comment by ROFISH | Hacker News Reader

The reason why I bought it is because it's Apple's cheapest laptop with two monitor outputs. I can hook up three additional screens to do programming/Photoshop/whatever.

You can't do two/three (native) screens on an Air or even the non-Retina MBP. (You can with USB, but it's laggy and there's no USB 3 things for Mac.)

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AFAIK the 2012 air supports more than one external monitor when daisy chained.

Underpowered with one screen, I'd love to see it with 3...

Whether it's "underpowered" depends on what you're doing, I'd say. Writing text, looking at photos, watching videos, browsing 99% websites, etc it performs just fine, and I'd venture to say that that's probably what most people will be doing with the machine. I had mine hooked up to 2 30" monitors the other day and it worked great.

>It turns out this machine can’t smoothly scroll media-rich websites like The Verge without noticeable choppiness.

I'm not so sure. If it can't even scroll websites, how can it handle 2 30" monitors just fine?

I think the choppiness of scrolling The Verge was overstated. It's noticeable if you're looking for it, but it doesn't affect the use of the site. And 99%+ of sites scroll smoothly, even when multiple monitors are attached.

What if the problem with The Verge is due to The Verge, and nothing else? Is The Verge doing retina upgrades for their graphics properly? Is their JavaScript doing stupid stuff like loading the double-resolution graphics every time the cursor moves instead of just the first time the page loads?

Why is The Verge choppy on a Retina display Mac?

As for handling 2 30" monitors, the graphics chip is more than capable of handling text, terminals and swathes of PDF documentation on that much real estate: it's non-taxing.

The moment you start doing crazy JavaScript (such as some sites which count how many characters you have left in a text area about a dozen times a second), things go downhill: this is a CPU load problem not a graphics display problem.

So again, I have to wonder what's causing the choppy scrolling on The Verge?

Scrolling works great on safari.

You can do 2 daisy-chained Thunderbolt displays with the non-retina MBP just fine.

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