[ratww]

But the "current" monitor is the one with the GUI and the mouse cursor. The secondary monitor is the one being used for external video. There are even dedicated APIs for it.

Are you a macOS user? Your other examples talk about Windows Update... the situation in macOS is a bit different, which is a lot of people doing audio/video flock to it. Not everyone needs external hardware, just a MacBook can do a lot.

[dkonofalski]

>Are you a macOS user?

Yes. macOS is my daily driver and I'm on Monterey.

All I'm saying is that, if anyone wants to say that this dot makes their use case unusable, then they have to admit that the current OS setup was always unusable for them because the OS was always able to display chrome on their displays. It may not have happened often or even in a way that they thought was "unusable" but it was able to happen. The only difference here is that they're not happy with the type of OS-level things that are displayed.

In my experience, people for whom any kind of errant display items matter use dedicated hardware devices for their I/O. If it didn't matter before because it was only windows/alerts/notifications/whatever, then that clearly doesn't make it "unusable" just "not preferred". I fully agree that there needs to be some kind of option for this on presentation displays but the people saying that SNL wouldn't have dedicated hardware for their displays is asinine.

[ratww]

Sure, in theory you are correct. We should seek the more reliable solution. In practice, this is not really a problem for anyone using macOS for small time visuals/performance/presentations, as long as you keep your computer well prepared for those situations. It works 99.9% of the time, which is 100% for most people (even pros) doing it sporadically. Maybe your solution covers a few more 9s, and you need those 9s (I know live broadcasting does), but this is unnecessary for most common folk, and you're dismissing this use case across this thread, which is why I'm answering to you.

I feel like the notifications issue you mention is bit of a red herring, because having too many things running in the background will cause problems regardless of using external gear, regardless of them showing on the screen or not. You can't rely on external gear alone for stability, the computer itself has to be stable. And the computer alone being stable is enough for 90% of people. And even if there are notifications... so what? This is people doing it for art purposes, on parties. They learn a lesson and never have to care again.

If those people are really using Steam on their computers (like you said on another comment), they surely aren't pros worried about performance, reliability, or anything of the sort that warrants a dedicated playback card, so I don't really see this use case (Steam+Blackmagic) existing at all.

Surely the default I/O is nowhere near enough for SNL or even for local broadcast, but it is good enough for a large contingent of people that don't need the same reliability that you or SNL needs. And it does works for them in practice, without notifications, and without OS chrome... except for the new orange dot, which is a nuisance.