This is disappointing. It has 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports but can only drive one external display. So unnecessary, this would be the perfect machine for my home and work setup, but I have 2 external displays in both cases.
Really disappointing considering they now support up to a 6k external display. Yet you can't do 2x 1080p, or 2x 4k.
I think Apple knows a lot of customers care about this and want it to be a barrier getting them into a pro machine. The cheapest laptop they sell with multi-external-monitor support is $1k more than their cheapest laptop overall ($2k vs $1k).
There are a few. They are able to do this by using something called Display Stream Compression. While it may be find for some, a lot of us would prefer not to have a diminished experience with a compressed stream.
Display Stream Compression (DSC) is fine. It is not a "diminished experience". DSC is visually lossless.
Instead, those docks use a technology called DisplayLink which has nothing to do with DSC. DisplayLink means that external monitors are basically "software" displays that are tremendously slower and often very limited in resolutions and frame rates. Having any DisplayLink display connected also breaks HDCP and can cause other problems.
DSC doesn't solve the hardware limitation of only being able to drive a single external display on the M1, that's a hardware thing that cannot be changed. You have confused it with DisplayLink, which is basically another graphics card, hence why it "solves" this problem, but the experience is worse because it's CPU-intensive/software rendered.
I bought and followed the online tutorials about using the DisplayLink docks and whatever else I purchased from Amazon and I couldn't get it to work with 2 external monitors. It isn't straightforward.
My 13" 2014 MBP supports 2 mDP + 1 HDMI = total 3 external displays.
Running external display at 4k@60Hz is possible but not straight forward, it requires patch core graphic framework, or using 3rd party boot loader. Newer models do not have this limitation afaik.
[0]: the exception is the M1 Mac Mini, which doesn't have an internal display, so it can use two external displays.
[1]: once again, the desktop version without a built-in monitor can support one additional monitor, so the Mac Studio with M1 Max can support 5 displays.
Every GPU on the market supports a limited number of monitors. There are fixed-function (not programmable in a traditional sense) blocks of silicon that are used to support each monitor.
M1’s GPU came equipped to only support the internal monitor and one external monitor… a very slim configuration, but that’s likely influenced by its smartphone processor ancestry. Smartphones don’t need to power a bunch of displays.
The larger M1 chips have bigger GPUs with more of those fixed function blocks.
It isn’t artificial market segmentation at a software level, but it is certainly market segmentation at a hardware level, and something they knew would happen when they designed these chips.
In the end, they were pretty spot on about the market segments. Most people want/need external display support… but one external display is plenty for most people. People who need more are likely to also want more in general, and the higher end options satisfy that.
It still would have been nice for them to upgrade things for M2.