MacOS: Monitor woes fixed?

A long time ago, $WORK decided to migrate away from BYOD, and I sold my beloved 2015 Macbook Pro (I literally could not afford to keep it, it was worth nearly a thousand bucks, I had no use for it, and it was about to very quickly tank in value due to MacOS support falling off for it). It was replaced with an original M1 Macbook Pro, whereupon I discovered the joys [pejorative] of DisplayLink.

I hated DisplayLink so much that I ended up getting rid of my dual monitors and switching to a single 4K screen just to avoid it. However a single 4K monitor doesn’t really lend itself well to my racoon-in-a-dumpster workflow, so earlier this year after upgrading me to a fancy M4 Pro Macbook Pro (say that three times fast), $WORK bought me two things: a Thunderbolt 5 (not DisplayLink) dock and a second monitor.

This led to much annoyance, because despite the fact that TB5 has more than enough bandwidth for two 4k60 monitors, and despite the fact it worked fine on my Asus laptop with fucking Linux installed, I simply could not get the dock to light up both screens.

It turns out this is an Apple driver limitation: they simply refuse to implement Multi-stream Transport. It’s never going to work. Every dock that does work in this configuration implements it via independent adaptors, rather than two outputs of the same virtual adaptor that my dock does (and I have to stress, this dock was not cheap, it’s a Lenovo one recommended by our IT department, I am glad I didn’t pay for it).

Apparently the solution is to just buy USB-C to HDMI adaptors, so I grudgingly went off down to Betta (because fuck Gerry Harvey) and bought one. This worked as advertised, both monitors came up, everything was fine.

Except I was still having the same trouble I’d had since I got the new dock: sporadically, the monitors would sleep for 5 to 10 seconds, most of the time they’d come back, sometimes one wouldn’t. Sometimes only one would sleep. Sometimes you’d have to unplug and replug something to get it to come back. Really fucking annoying.

Reader, I tried for a solid couple of months to fix this, to no avail. I tried lower resolutions (“oh there’s not enough bandwidth!”), I tried buying newer, fancier cables (“Oh Apple stuff is just picky about the cables you use, you simply must use decent cables”, I literally bought 8K rated cables), I tried everything.

I noted again, that my Linux laptop functioned fine - what the fuck is going on in the world right now?

Finally, after having it happen for the 8th time in two hours, I did yet another Google search. Unsure if it’s because the index rearranged itself or I just happened to Prompt It Right, but I came across an old Reddit thread about a different problem, with a solution that seemed worth having a crack at:

It worked all Wednesday, including through a meeting Wednesday night without an embarassing “going dark while my camera is still on” moment. And it’s worked all the way through to the weekend without skipping a beat.

Is it too much to hope it’s fixed?

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

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Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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