Mac’s, don’t you just love them, except when Apple sticks their head in the sand and won’t listen to their consumers. What am I going on about I hear you say?
Since 1988 Apple have been supporting dual monitors with their products, it took Microsoft until XP to do the same. Having the ability to use dual monitors with applications like Photoshop is fantastic, so whats the problem? Apple supports dual monitors right?
Well, Apple have only allowed you to add additional monitors to your primary monitor, or replace your primary monitor with the add on monitor, take the MacBook, a PC designed for portability, I can easily add a monitor supporting HD+ resolution no problem, I can then use that monitor as my primary monitor, and I don’t even have to use the 13″ built in screen in my Macbook. But what if I want to use 2 monitors? Well that’s easy you may think, you have the 13″ monitor on the Macbook and you can run the external as well. Does it work? Yes, Practical? Hardly.
There is nothing worse than running dual displays on a macbook (period). It’s the worst user experience of any hardware / OS supporting dual screens. Running the 13″ screen next to a 27″ screen is ergonomic hell. Is this really that big a problem? Well a quick Google of “Dual External Monitors on Macbook” gives some insight into just how widespread the problem is.
Solutions? Well the easy solution would be for Apple to support dual external monitor to allow users to use 2 identical monitors externally on a MacBook, after all most other hardware allready supports this, in may require a docking station, but it works. Currently the only solutions I have seen working involves video splitters, the OS still thinks its one large monitor and snapping windows to one screen etc would be a nightmare (IMO).
Apple, listen to what people want, we want dual external monitor support on MacBooks. We don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a top end Macbook Pro’s and be limited to “practically” one screen.
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For those of you interested in geeking around, you have have a look at these “solutions”:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/dh2go/
http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=3571
