This is to understand how the MacBook works with outputs for the different thunderbolt buses on the laptop (of which there are 4, one of which is taken up by the HDMI and SDXC card slot). It then asks the audience to test if a dock with more than 2 display outputs can work as well. This post is helpfully letting people know that the new MacBooks can in fact display out to multiple monitors via a single cable, so long as the dock used supports multiple displays.
There was a potential (and nothing saying otherwise) that the Max could do 4 external displays but only by plugging in a cable to each TB port and the HDMI port all at once. We are aware the m1 Pro and Max support multiple external monitors, but there was no specific mention that they could do it through a single thunderbolt port via a dock. For everyone who doesn't understand the point of this post. If anyone here has a thunderbolt dock and an M1 max and can test to see if you can get 3 or 4 external screens from one thunderbolt dock please post in here! So I might try buying one of these new OWC thunderbolt 4 docks when they are available soon and sell my Dell docks if they will truely let me plug in and extend my desktop to all 3 of my external monitors and peripherals with only 1 thunderbolt connection into my MacBook. So the M1 max/pro seems to not have the same limitation as the base M1 macs which is awesome.
The M1 max can support 4 external monitors and the M1 pro can support 2. I can’t test it but I have a feeling if I had a thunderbolt 4 dock with 3+ thunderbolt ports in it I could run even more screens off of it too, but my Dell dock only has one thunderbolt in port. I was able to extend to two 1440p monitors with my dock and only needed one thunderbolt cable plugged into my MacBook! I just tested out plugging one monitor (Dell 1440p) using a usb-c to DisplayPort cable into the thunderbolt port on my Dell WD19TB dock and then my second monitor into one of the normal DisplayPort ports on the dock and it worked! I have a 16” M1 max and as long as you have a thunderbolt 3 or 4 dock that has one or more thunderbolt in ports you can extend multiple displays without relying on displaylink or MST. The M1 macs all had to rely on janky Displaylink docks to get multiple monitor support from one thunderbolt port on the MacBook but this isn’t the case for the M1 Max or Pro. I have also seen a lot of outdated info in here lately recommending people use the old Displaylink docks which is bad advice.
#Macbook pro multiple monitors usb c how to
I have seen this asked all over the place on here and other places and haven’t seen anyone answer how to do this yet so I thought I would share.