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sebalvarez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 15, 2022
147
60
I can't believe that the company that has some of the best hardware and software engineers in the world, still can't figure out display management in macOS.

Plainly, it's a nightmare. It was a nightmare in Monterey, and after doing a complete wipe and fresh install of Ventura in my Mac Studio, I can definitely say it's still a nightmare. You connect a second monitor and if you're lucky, it doesn't make it main right away. But just one reboot, and you can be assured that the second monitor will suddenly be turned into the main one.

So you have to put things back in place. Then you connect a third monitor using the HDMI output, because it goes to your TV set. So now it thinks that because you connected a TV set, you want to make it main monitor. So now you have to waste more time changing things around, and making the monitor in front of me the main monitor for a second time.

Then you reboot with all three, and now the machine decided to make the second monitor, which I have on the left, the main one. So now I have to keep wasting time. And it's not just setting the main monitor over and over, it's that you main set it as main, but the apps stay on the monitor they were at, so you have to drag all the window, or go to the Window menu and do the Move to the monitor you have set as main, and this is not one time, it's over and over and over.

Sometimes it decides to swap things around for no reason and assign the arrangement to whatever the hell it randomly decides. It's like an evil child residing inside the machine switching circuits around. It's maddening. I've been putting up with this since I got this Mac in June. I also have a 2021 MacBook Pro, and it has the same problem.

How is it possible that a $5,000 Mac that is in everything else, a miracle of engineering, a machine that outperforms almost every other machine in existence that is not a large and noisy workstation, can have far worse display management than Windows? Because I use Windows too, not as much, but I’ve used both Macs and PCs for the last 25 years, and to this day, even on a fairly new Dell laptop with Windows 10, display management is nowhere near this horrible. In Windows, when I set a display to main, it stays that way. And I don’t mean just on that Dell, every single Windows computer I’ve had or used for work, at worst would swap monitors the first time I connected an additional one, but once I put them back, they stayed that way.

Why is that so hard for Apple’s engineers to program macOS to recognize each monitor and save the assignment it had, and the position it had? Even though I’m using two identical Samsung monitors, they both have different serial numbers, and something called UID, which can be seen from the system report app when clicking on each of them back and forth.

And SwitchresX helps up to a certain point, but when macOS decides to swap monitors any way it wants, it puts all the open apps in what now considers the main monitor, and if you had made a custom display set in SwitchresX with a shortcut, when you apply it, the monitors change, but all the apps stay in the monitor that macOS set as main.

And SwtichresX doesn’t work sometimes, because display management is so chaotic in macOS that sometimes it changes the numbers of the two displays that are the same brand and model. So SwitchresX thinks that display #1 and #2 are what they were when you created the display set, but the OS decided to swap those numbers, so now when you apply the display set, suddenly your main display is on the side where the second one should be.

It’s like a crazy, sadistic, bratty child inside the machine changing the circuit paths around to drive people crazy.

And it’s even more infuriating when you have been sending feedback about this for months, and a new major version of the OS is released, and it’s the same nightmare.

Even worse, you can’t even post anything in the Apple forums because the moderators are children that take offense if you post anything even remotely critical of Apple, even if you don’t use any foul language. After being an Apple customer for two decades, having spent probably close to $20,000 in several Apple computers and other devices, and I’m not rich in the least, so it’s infuriating to see such an arrogant attitude from that company.

This is not something that is going to send me running to the Windows/PC world. I’m not an Apple fanboy, I use Apple products because I really like them, and they make my life better. But this attitude is the reason why many people call Apple a cult, and I wish the company had a more humble attitude and treated its customers with more respect, given that these machines are a lot more expensive than PCs.
 

sebalvarez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 15, 2022
147
60
Just now, I rebooted a minute after writing this. I have my main monitor in front of me, and the secondary monitor to my left. Well, after rebooting, the prompt for the password showed up on the second monitor. And after entering it, everything loaded on the second monitor!!

So for the millionth time, I had to open the system settings, go to the Display section, drag the monitor that in that graphic was on the left, but in reality was right in front of me, to the right of the other one, and set it as main.

Now, you might suggest that I disconnect the cables and swap them. That would work maybe half the times, and do nothing the other half. Sometimes I'm so fed up that I don't even want to open the system settings anymore, I just get up, walk around the desk and pull down the cable from the second monitor.

Why is this so pathetic in an OS like this? I just don't get how an OS is so great at everything else, it's garbage when it comes to simple display management. It's not like I have 20 monitors with some weird hub connected to this thing. So why is it so incredibly crappy???
 

chabig

macrumors G4
Sep 6, 2002
11,461
9,328
...after doing a complete wipe and fresh install of Ventura in my Mac Studio...
Reinstalling modern macOS doesn't make any changes. None. The new OS is a bit for bit identical copy of the old OS. So stop doing that. It's a waste of time. Every Mac running the same OS version has an identical copy of the operating system running from a signed and sealed disk image. Your Ventura is exactly the same as my Ventura, down to the individual bit.

As for your screen problems, I'm sorry to hear that. I have never had that experience with a Mac. I'm sure Apple engineers run multiple displays themselves, so I would expect inherent bugs to be detected at Apple. Thus, I would there is something unique in your system. What could that be? Perhaps it's related to a third party app you've installed, and the first ones I'd suspect are those related to display management. Start with uninstalling SwitchresX. I think that's the most likely source of your problems. You might disagree, but at least consider it, so install it and see if your system behaves better.
 
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sebalvarez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 15, 2022
147
60
Reinstalling modern macOS doesn't make any changes. None. The new OS is a bit for bit identical copy of the old OS. So stop doing that. It's a waste of time. Every Mac running the same OS version has an identical copy of the operating system running from a signed and sealed disk image. Your Ventura is exactly the same as my Ventura, down to the individual bit.
Sorry, what do you mean by "modern" macOS? I never said that I was reinstalling Ventura. I said that I did a fresh install, after wiping out the internal drive, which had Monterey before. Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I thought I did when I mentioned that display management was a nightmare in Monterey and is still a nightmare in Ventura.

As for your screen problems, I'm sorry to hear that. I have never had that experience with a Mac. I'm sure Apple engineers run multiple displays themselves, so I would expect inherent bugs to be detected at Apple. Thus, I would there is something unique in your system. What could that be? Perhaps it's related to a third party app you've installed, and the first ones I'd suspect are those related to display management. Start with uninstalling SwitchresX. I think that's the most likely source of your problems. You might disagree, but at least consider it, so install it and see if your system behaves better.
This is not something with my particular system. We're not talking about a custom built PC with thousands of possible configurations. We're talking about the stock Ultra Mac Studio with the only customization of making the internal drive 4 TB, which Apple did itself. And the display management has nothing to do with the internal drive size.

And like I mentioned, I also have a 2021 MacBook Pro with the same display management chaos. And it has nothing to do with SwitchresX, because I haven't even installed it in Ventura yet, I installed SwitchresX in Monterey after months or putting up with this situation, and it helps at least in having a shortcut that will change the monitors, but even that sometimes doesn't work, not because of SwitchresX, but because of the chaotic way macOS assigns numbers to them.

Sometimes the monitor in front of me will get the "LF32TU87 (1)" designation, and the other one, the "LF32TU87 (2)". So I create a display set in SwitchresX to keep them that way, and assign a shortcut to it. I save it, reboot, and maybe they will come back as they were, maybe swapped. But when SwitchresX loads, it will turn them into what I set them up.

However, sometimes macOS will reassign the same monitors the numbers but swapped, so SwitchresX will think that the monitor that was display (1) when I created the display set, meaning the monitor in front of me, or MAIN, is still the main display. But because macOS swapped the two monitor numbers, now when SwitchresX applies, or I manually apply that display set, now the main display is not the physical monitor right in front of me, it's the second display that is the physical display to my left.

This is not a problem with my Mac Studio. All these machines are the same except for the minor customizations that Apple does on request, like in my case adding another 2 TB SSD or NVME, M2 or whatever the drive inside is, or swapping the chip for one with 128 GB of RAM (not my case). Besides, before these two Samsungs, I had two identical Dells, and the TV set was a Vizio, and I still had this chaos.

I tried everything I could think of, including connecting the main and second displays using two different connectors, like the main one would be Thunderbolt 3 and the second one DisplayPort, then vice versa.

This is so crazy that when it swaps the displays, I swap the cables physically and it's still the wrong setup in the system. This shouldn't be so hard in a machine this expensive and that doesn't have all the thousands of possible configurations PCs have, where you can choose between hundreds of current graphics cards, motherboards, etc.

This is a Mac, Macs are supposed to make life easier, and I've had Macs since 1999, and not one before these two had this problem.
 

jgbr

macrumors 6502a
Sep 14, 2007
965
1,186
It’s been a core rot issues for ages. Sadly some people here would rather apple redesigned system preferences than deal with bugs and issues like the one you mentioned.
 

sebalvarez

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 15, 2022
147
60
It’s been a core rot issues for ages. Sadly some people here would rather apple redesigned system preferences than deal with bugs and issues like the one you mentioned.
When you say ages, how long are you saying? I don't know if this was an issue with newer Macs, because my previous Macs before these were a 2015 iMac and also a 2015 MacBook Pro. But with both of them, the built-in display was always the main one. I connected a second display using a Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter, and once in a while I connected a second adapter to send to the TV set, but I don't remember this nightmare.

But this is the first time in many years that I've had a Mac without a built-in display, and it's a freaking nightmare. I'm sure that if my two identical displays were the Apple display something that was released with the Mac Studio, this wouldn't happen. But this is the kind of thing where Apple fails miserably and has an arrogant attitude that Apple haters use as ammunition.

Tim Cook & Co. don't understand that not every Apple customer is rich and can afford all those extra things. I don't need an almost $2,000 display when a $500 one works just fine for me. I'm sure the Apple one looks much better. But I'm sure a Ferrari drives a lot better than my Jeep. Doesn't mean I can afford it.

I mean, I have two buttons in my overprice Apple keyboard that I paid $130 two years ago, those two keys are for display brightness. First of all, having spent $3,000 in an iMac in 2016 I should've received a regular size keyboard, like every PC, not that joke of a small version without the numpad that Apple still to this day ships with a lot of their machines. But I did, and at one point I got fed up with it, so I tried to find a decent alternative that wouldn't cost $130 like the Apple one, and I waste $50 in one of the Chinese crap brands name Jelly, or Jolly, or something like that.

Well, it was awful. It would go to sleep but wouldn't wake up the milisecond I pressed any key, so I would start typing and when I looked up realize that it didn't type the first word or so. So eventually I ended up spending the $130 in the Apple keyboard with the numpad, when in the PC world, you can have a very decent keyboard for about $20 or $30.

But these two keys, the brightness keys, which worked like a charm in the iMac, don't do crap in the Mac Studio. Oh, I'm sure if I connected the Apple monitor it would work. But why doesn't it work with Dell or Samsung monitors? I mean, there is a protocol that I can't remember the name right now, but it allows for that kind of thing, to control monitor functions like display and contrast.

So why doesn't Apple allow its keyboard to control brightness? Well, so people buy their overpriced monitor.
 
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