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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

There are countless non-5k iMacs. I never said it had to be that. I had a beautiful 27” 2.5k display from 2011 I could’ve put to work.

There is no excuse other than laziness IMO. They likely decided not enough people use it and that they didn’t need to keep an excellent feature (total speculation to be fair). I can use iMovie to directly control/run playback from a dvcam from 2002 via like 4 daisy chained cables - including FireWire 400 - but they can’t connect an iMac anymore over thunderbolt 4 after supporting that for over a decade? Nah. Maybe there is a legitimate reason but I am incredibly skeptical.

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The iMacs before the 5k version did support Target Display mode.

They dropped it when the cable and connector standards of the day didn't support a display that big.

That's not laziness, it's a technical limitation.

Now that we have newer high bandwidth connection standards, you can once again use a newer iMac as an external display over a thunderbolt connection.

Yes the previous iMacs sent a signal. Their current computers don’t receive the signal. This is not about the 5K display, you’re missing the core problem. It stopped working when the silicon line came out. You can’t get any iMac to work in target display mode on silicon Macs.

That’s not a technical limitation, that’s laziness. Go read more about this. It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.

There is literally nothing stopping you from using a modern iMac as an external display using a thunderbolt connection today.

If you're OK with video compression artifacts, you can even do it over a WiFi connection.

You cannot grab an iMac, plug it into a silicon Mac, and get a picture on the iMac (without 3rd party software). This is incorrect. Please go look this up. The feature stopped working when silicon Mac’s came out. It only works on Intel Macs. 5K iMac or not.

Target display mode, the feature that allowed this, is no longer supported.

> without 3rd party software

At least you can finally acknowledge reality.

Also, VLC over a wired connection and streaming from one Mac to another using WiFi (AirPlay) are built into the OS.

I have already explained that and it’s not the same as native support any more than display link means one can claim M1’s run 2 external monitors (Mac mini excluded). I wrote this multiple comments ago:

> It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50266629

You know what I am saying. This is a dumb argument and I’m moving on.

When 5K iMacs first came out in 2014, they were mostly limited to displayport 1.2, which was unable to support 5K without either dropping to 45Hz or using chroma subsampling. So the 2014 version is excused, and we can excuse the 2015 version too.

But with the 2017 revision, they had a displayport 1.4 GPU in there, and there was no good reason for leaving display target mode out.

And they've left it out ever since.

Streaming compressed video with a significant latency penalty doesn't count. But if it we act like it does count, then they lose their excuse for removing target display in the first place, because even in 2014 it was possible to do 4:2:0 5K @ 60Hz over a normal connector. That looks better than compressed video does!

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