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by rattray 1937 days ago
Speaking as another sad owner of a Macbook Air (pre-M1), I do wish Apple made it more clear that they can't drive monitors well, but I agree with your overall sentiment – OP probably would have been much, much happier with a higher-spec'd M1 MBP (though given the price and their OS preference, maybe still not happy enough).
3 comments
perardi 1937 days ago
I too agree that the display limitations are non-obvious.

I’m not sure if it’s a typical use case to run 2 displays on an Air, but that is a way more obvious set of affairs on a Mac mini, especially for a developer porting/testing software for the new architecture. You can run 2 displays on the Mac mini…but not the same way you used to.

https://thesweetsetup.com/running-multiple-monitors-on-an-m1...

(That is actually a clearer guide than Apple’s support docs.)

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rattray 1937 days ago
Yeah, another gotcha is that my MBA can't even drive a single 4k display at 60FPS, which I'm not sure was visible anywhere on the product page. (Not sure whether this limitation holds for the M1 MBA).
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smoldesu 1937 days ago
Yep, that was particularly disappointing to me. My 1440p panel supports up to 144hz, but MacOS only acknowledged 50hz and 60hz for the panel. Not that it made much of a difference in the first place, a flashing panel at 60hz is just as unusable as a flashing panel at 144hz.
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silicon2401 1937 days ago
Thanks for sharing this, I've been wanting a Mac Mini but am now wondering if it's worth it with this strange caveat
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MarkSweep 1937 days ago
Both the MBP and MBA say this in their tech specs, so getting the MBP would not help:

> Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and: > One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz

The M1 Mac Mini can drive two displays: 6k on Thunderbolt and 4K on HDMI.

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cowmoo728 1937 days ago
The 2020 M1 macbook pro made no sense though. It was a macbook air with a cpu fan, touch bar, improved sound + display for an extra $300. The CPU and GPU and ports were identical.
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rattray 1937 days ago
Wow, right. The M1 MBP available now doesn't even have 4 ports. Definitely still worth waiting...
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