I’m an Apple software QA engineer (yes, we exist) and I’d love to hear about bugs you’ve encountered. I can create bug reports (aka radars) and/or bother the right teams/people to get bugs fixed. To be clear this is not official company business, thoughts/opinions are my own, and I’m doing this in my free time to keep Lemmy awesome and because I love you guys.
Alt/throwaway account for obvious reasons.
Want to try and help as many folks as possible so please feel free to share this thread with any other communities where it is relevant.
In the interest of keeping the scope here narrow, rules for bugs:
- iOS/iPadOS and macOS issues only. Please ensure that you are running the latest version of iOS/iPadOS (
18.3.2) or macOS (15.3.2) - Please provide detailed step by step instructions on how to reproduce the issue. If I can’t reproduce it on my test devices, then I can’t report it.
- Provide as many hardware details as you can (e.g. iPhone/iPad/Mac model, year, device specs)
- Can’t help with general UI/UX complaints, use the feedback form for that.
- Can’t help with vague power/performance/battery drain issues unless you can provide exact steps to reproduce.
- Can’t help with services (e.g. iCloud, App Store, Apple Account).
- Can’t help with 3rd party software
- Can’t guarantee that anything I report will be fixed and due to the nature of how we work I won’t be able to share status updates, but I’ll certainly try my best to move things along internally.
- Please don’t ask me about upcoming hardware/software; whatever it is, I have no idea what you’re talking about and no it doesn’t exist.
Edit 1: thanks for the reports everyone! Some of these require a little more research/testing so while it might take me a little longer to get back to you, that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen your message :)
I suspect that this is a feature, or at least a partner-related market decision, rather than a bug, and I suspect the most you’ll be able to say is “the weather is nice today” or “thank you for sharing this”, buuuut…
DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253432530?sortBy=rank
With a full implementation of DisplayPort 1.2 MST it should be possible to output to two independent (non-mirrored) monitors over a single USB-C port. This can be via an MST hub/dongle or using monitors that support DisplayPort MST daisy chaining. This is a core part of the spec to the point that my Steam Deck supports this.
macOS, however, will treat MST displays as targets for mirroring instead of separate displays. The only way to have an elegant “one wire” experience with a MacBook is to use a much more expensive Thunderbolt dock or a dock that uses a DisplayLink chipset which requires a driver to be installed (as DisplayLink are a company unrelated to DisplayPort).
It’s worth noting that macOS does support MST in the form of two video streams for one very high-resolution monitor, which is kind of interesting.
I’d love it if we could use MST docks/hubs/splitters with macOS rather than either needing expensive third-party peripherals or plugging multiple wires into our MacBooks. Especially because most office setups I’ve seen recently use MST hubs if they offer dual monitors!
Thanks for reading this far, and more importantly thank you for soliciting feedback in this forum and manner. Best of luck!
Oh this is why my two monitor dongle only works on Linux.
I thought it was weird that I couldn’t get the second monitor to work without plugging it directly into a Mac, but I put it down to being a cheap dongle.
Yep, that’s the problem 😭 If Apple just finished their driver then it would work.
I suspect they’re protecting Thunderbolt hub manufacturers and DisplayLink, as Apple don’t sell a daisy-chainable Thunderbolt monitor or their own hub/docking station so I can’t see any other reason not to just implement it.