New USB-C dock triples M1 Mac external monitor support, Anker says | Ars Technica
From a technical perspective this is interesting and clever. But I’m really surprised Anker is actually bring this to market.
Something tells this is only an OS update away from becoming a brick…
Is this something that can really be fixed in the OS - I thought it was a lake of controller lanes?
@dstrauss not “lanes” as we are used to on Intel. The culprit here is the unified memory architecture of the M and A series chips. How memory gets allocated to the various cores including graphics cores is dynamic and managed by the OS. It blurs the line slightly between software and firmware.
Its nothing new really. There have been other display link based docks with support up to 3/4 monitors that dubiously have M1 compatibility (Targus USB-C Universal Quad 4K (QV4K)) but then the same as this one, if it does work, you get all sorts of Resolution/stability/hrz issues.
Somewhat of a mute point since the M1 Max/Pro natively support 4 monitors. (5 if you include Sidecar). And M2 I’m sure will retain at least support for 2 or 3. Just the 1st gen M1’ers got monitor support screwed, but that’s the risk with 1st gen.