<story><title>M1 Macs cannot support dual Extended displays through their Thunderbolt 3 ports</title><url>https://www.caldigit.com/apple-silicon-mac-and-caldigit-dock-compatibility/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ps</author><text>I own MB Pro 16 (i9, 64GB RAM) and M1 Mac Mini (16GB) and I am still perplexed why do so many people ignore or not mention the sluggishness of the macOS on M1.&lt;p&gt;Switching apps is often plagued with at least noticable up to utterly annoying lag. Starting even optimized apps sometimes feels surprisingly slow. If the CPU is even under the light load (20 % reported by Activity monitor), these issues happen more frequently and overall responsivness gets much worse. It is not due to the low memory which I try to spare on Mini.&lt;p&gt;Yeah, Safari is fast, even faster than on the iPad Pro. But I am developer, often use multiple browsers, many docker containers, might spin up IDE and I am certainly not the one who they made it for.</text></item><item><author>real-dino</author><text>Meanwhile Intel Macs can&amp;#x27;t support external displays without using the discrete GPU and thermal throttling under moderate workloads.&lt;p&gt;They are completely unsuited for multi-monitor workloads without an eGPU.&lt;p&gt;More specifically, the draw 30W of additional power that has to go somewhere. You can turn down the refresh rate, to say 10Hz or something, but it still has to use the discrete GPU. The cooling solution simply isn&amp;#x27;t handled to deal with it, as they have crammed as much processing power they can into the ultra-light chassis.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile you can play World of Warcraft whilst drawing just 25W of power TOTAL on the M1 (estimate, I don&amp;#x27;t play WoW anymore). This is while the Intel Mac is drawing 70-100 Watts from the socket for just rendering a window to the secondary display.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s got to the stage that I prefer to use my 13 inch M1 over a top of the line 16 inch provided by work. When M1 finally supports docker, I might even consider not using the 16 inch at all. It crashes due to thermals about twice a week due to the constant high temperature and eats through batteries!&lt;p&gt;If anyone has a solution to this, I&amp;#x27;m all ears, but it feels like every nay-sayer of the M1 is dismissing just how many compromises Intel based laptops (not just Macs) have. I had just as many issues with the Dell XPS, where even basic video games would become unplayable after 15 minutes due to CPU throttling down to 0.8 Ghz.&lt;p&gt;The M1 has been the first laptop I have been truly happy with as a desktop user.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spockz</author><text>On my MPB M1 everything feels exquisitely responsive with the exception of the first time that apps that need to be translated by Rosetta. So it appears something might be off on your install.</text></comment>
<story><title>M1 Macs cannot support dual Extended displays through their Thunderbolt 3 ports</title><url>https://www.caldigit.com/apple-silicon-mac-and-caldigit-dock-compatibility/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ps</author><text>I own MB Pro 16 (i9, 64GB RAM) and M1 Mac Mini (16GB) and I am still perplexed why do so many people ignore or not mention the sluggishness of the macOS on M1.&lt;p&gt;Switching apps is often plagued with at least noticable up to utterly annoying lag. Starting even optimized apps sometimes feels surprisingly slow. If the CPU is even under the light load (20 % reported by Activity monitor), these issues happen more frequently and overall responsivness gets much worse. It is not due to the low memory which I try to spare on Mini.&lt;p&gt;Yeah, Safari is fast, even faster than on the iPad Pro. But I am developer, often use multiple browsers, many docker containers, might spin up IDE and I am certainly not the one who they made it for.</text></item><item><author>real-dino</author><text>Meanwhile Intel Macs can&amp;#x27;t support external displays without using the discrete GPU and thermal throttling under moderate workloads.&lt;p&gt;They are completely unsuited for multi-monitor workloads without an eGPU.&lt;p&gt;More specifically, the draw 30W of additional power that has to go somewhere. You can turn down the refresh rate, to say 10Hz or something, but it still has to use the discrete GPU. The cooling solution simply isn&amp;#x27;t handled to deal with it, as they have crammed as much processing power they can into the ultra-light chassis.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile you can play World of Warcraft whilst drawing just 25W of power TOTAL on the M1 (estimate, I don&amp;#x27;t play WoW anymore). This is while the Intel Mac is drawing 70-100 Watts from the socket for just rendering a window to the secondary display.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s got to the stage that I prefer to use my 13 inch M1 over a top of the line 16 inch provided by work. When M1 finally supports docker, I might even consider not using the 16 inch at all. It crashes due to thermals about twice a week due to the constant high temperature and eats through batteries!&lt;p&gt;If anyone has a solution to this, I&amp;#x27;m all ears, but it feels like every nay-sayer of the M1 is dismissing just how many compromises Intel based laptops (not just Macs) have. I had just as many issues with the Dell XPS, where even basic video games would become unplayable after 15 minutes due to CPU throttling down to 0.8 Ghz.&lt;p&gt;The M1 has been the first laptop I have been truly happy with as a desktop user.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_ix</author><text>I am a developer too, but I haven’t noticed any of these issues on my 16GB M1 MacBook Pro. macOS has been nothing short of zippy.&lt;p&gt;I wonder why you believe that everyone’s ignoring the issues you experience? Could it be some local phenomenon, instead?</text></comment>