I received a new MacBook Pro 14" M3 from my employer, which starts at €2.049 ($2224) in Italy. It looks like a solid machine, at least physically speaking. I wired it up to my fairly basic dual-monitor office setup, just to realize that confusingly enough I could not use the HDMI and USB-C port at the same time.
I thought that was a cable issue, then a bug, but nope. It turns out the “base” M3 chip is essentially an overclocked iPad chip, and it does not have two display controllers. For that, you will need a confusingly named MacBook Pro M3 Pro , which retails for a mouth-watering EUR 2.599, aka US $ 2821 at the current change rate, so I cannot blame my company’s IT department for assuming a new MacBook Pro with a total of three video-capable connectors to not have such a standard feature.
I have been driving dual monitors on MacBooks since 2012 or so, if my memory is not that bad. I’ve had a two monitor setup hooked to my 2017 Dell XPS 13 since day one.
Embarrassing Excuses
When I posted this on Mastodon, and talked to friends in real life, some people tried to justify Apple on this.
‘That’s what the M3 Pro is for’
No. A machine that costs over €2000 and has Pro in its name needs to have at least the very basic features for any “pro” user. Everyone from developers to doctors to university researchers with a bunch of browser tabs needs at least two displays nowadays.
What Apple is doing is trying to squeeze even more profit out of all users who didn’t read the fine print, buy the “base” MacBook Pro Tier, and produce yet another round of e-waste since this machine will be unusable and soon flow on the used market.
‘The base M3 is a mobile chip’
Then Apple should not have shoved a mobile chip in a $2k so-called-Pro laptop in the first place. Making willingly unusable “poverty specced” products (32GB iPad, anyone?) for absurd prices is highly unethical and preys on the lack of technical expertise for users to buy stuff that will date fast and require a replacement within a couple of years.
Display Controllers are expensive / take space
As someone who is quite nerdy about ARM chips, I restate that if even Qualcomm has had two or more display controllers for years, at EUR 2K, saving a couple of dollars on the chip price should be the last of Apple’s priorities. If Intel, another very-for-profit company, could take enough chip real estate to embed all the required display controllers in their graphics silicon since years, so can Apple today.
‘You can close the lid and use it in clamshell mode’
Some people suggested me to close the lid as a hack to re-route the second screen. This is an official workaround according to Apple.com:
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Connect an external keyboard and mouse or trackpad.
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Connect the Mac to power. If the external display provides power to the Mac, a separate power adapter isn’t needed.
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Connect the first display. This will be the primary display, supporting up to 6K resolution at 60 Hz (or 4K at 144 Hz).
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Close the MacBook Air lid.
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Connect the second display. This will be the secondary display, supporting up to 5K resolution at 60 Hz (or 4K at 100 Hz).
First of all, this does not work. Apple has implemented this workaround in the cheaper MacBook Air, but it still does not look to work on the higher-end Pro I am using - it has been promised some months ago, but not yet delivered.
Secondly, I use my laptop’s webcam for videoconferencing, which obviously won’t work with my lid closed, and I like to keep less important windows (Slack, Spotify, Outlook…) on the builtin laptop display as a third monitor while using the desk setup for serious stuff.
And even if this feature did work, it would still feel like a third-world hack on such a “first world” machine.
‘This issue has existed since the M1 chip’
So Apple has had almost three years to fix it, but still didn’t? Brilliant.
Switching back to Linux, as a matter of trust
To be clear, I don’t have anything against Apple products. Believing that technology needs to make my life easier without much configuration hassle, I owned many bits of their ecosystem at some point in my life, and still admire the quality their products still tend to achieve.
In 2013 or so, I considered the MacBook Pro in my household a genuine “pro” machine. My father still uses that Mac as a secondary machine from time to time, after I put an SSD and more RAM in it to make it jumped at least five years further in usability and spec range.
Yet seeing Apple trying to underspec amazingly engineered hardware - probably the best on the planet - to squeeze a tiny bit more income and boost its trillion-dollar stock value further is disheartening, and I have lost a bit of the trust I had years ago in this brand to help me as an engineer to build things faster and more productively. Bringing basic features to more and more extremely upmarket models is neither sustainable, nor honest to their actual “pro” niche of customers.