Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Satechi Launches Thunderbolt 4 Multi-Display Docking Station
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The multiple external displays part? No. It sounds like you’d be okay to connect one display via Thunderbolt But it’s an expensive and unnecessary way to do that.
Much, much better, much more solid and well made (at least so far). I would say the biggest difference between OWC and Satechi is that you get what you paid for. In terms of quality I haven’t been disappointed.
OWC is… well you know.
In all the Thunderbolt versions I’ve seen I’ve never come across a device that can provide KVM style functionality. I have a MBP and a couple of Minis. I have an ASD which as we know has a pretty capable logic board. Let me connect my external Apple mouse and keyboard to my display and use a key combination to flip my KVM between computers. Too much to ask?
Some of the newer Dell USB-C monitors have KVM functionality built-in. It works well, but I don't think it's invoked by a keyboard shortcut - only via the monitor's on-screen menu. But there may be a keyboard shortcut I am unaware of.
"It doesn't meet my needs therefore it's useless and no-one should use it"
Whilst Displaylink isn't great for everything, it does work really well for a lot of general tasks.
Yep, the Dell Display and Peripheral Manager allows for certain displays, such as the very nice U2723QE, to switch source via user-configurable hot key.
All we need now is for Apple to repent and reinstate Space Gray so that this matches a newly acquired MacBook Pro. Never going to happen, of course, because for some reason they think Chipped & Smudged Coal is the only non-silver color option anyone needs 🤦♂️
So if you've been doing this for years, why couldn't an M3 MacBook Air do it just fine?
Because MBA is the low end of Apple laptops. I have been doing it for years with the MBP highest end of Apple laptops that (unlike MBAs) are designed to provide that capability. Even at Apple's highest end the process of driving multiple displays has for me seen some real-world challenges, but it works. The idea that some third-party dock is going to make the lame ports/bandwidth/controllers/RAM of Apple's lower end laptops magically drive lots of external displays well does not make sense to me. Show me.
Last edited:
Yeah it’s crazy how the entire peripherals industry (and even the desktop/laptop industry) seems to be dragging its feet on adopting any kind of support for 10 GbE or even 2.5 GbE. Gigabit is really showing its limitations for local networking these days.
I don't have the setup to test this, but according to Apple, you could use 2 daisy chained Thunderbolt Displays as external (with the built in one, so 3 total) back in 2012 on the MacBook Air. The M series chips haven't had as many officially until recently now, but I don't see what would be limiting them if you used the USB 4 ports on an M3 for the extra "unofficial" ones.
That said, I just wish Apple would let us use multiple displays natively at under 6K resolution if we wanted. If a MacBook Air can run a 6K display, why can't it run 2 1080p displays instead?
...bear in mind that those were "only" 1440p designs, and could each run off a regular 4-lane DisplayPort 1.2 stream, and Thunderbolt 1/2 could carry two independent streams. This wasn't the same as DisplayPort daisy-chaining (which runs multiple displays off a single stream).
Yes, Intel chips have more display controllers than M1/M2/M3 and can often support 3/4 external displays but not necessarily 5k/6k displays (...which are rarely used in the Intel/PC world, but quite central to Mac). A 5k display needs 4 times the bandwidth of 2560x1440 and about 80% more bandwidth than "4k" UHD.
I think a single external display (...and the M3 can now drive two in clamshell mode) is a reasonable compromise for the mobility-centric MacBook Air - many of which are never going to be connected up to any external display. The problem comes with higher-end MacBook Pros still using the regular Mx chips. One "issue" with the M-series is that the CPU performance rather outstrips the display, RAM and I/O capabilities.
I suspect that post-Apple silicon a lot of people who would have turned their noses up at an Intel MBA and gone for a MacBook "Pro" (which used more powerful CPUs and GPUs, even if they were still "i5") have been convinced that they only need a M-series MBA based on benchmarks, without considering displays, IO and RAM. That's compounded by a long wait for the M1 Pro/Max to appear and Apple releasing "Pro"-branded machines with the exact same M1/M2/M3 processors as the Air. I'd wager that a lot of people using Intel MacBooks with 2-3 external displays were using MacBook Pros.
There's also a question of what you are going to do on those displays - maybe lots of spreadsheets or tons of code (in which case, DisplayLink will probably be fine), but Macs are always pitched somewhat towards content creation and graphics and (for better or worse) rely on GPU-driven scaling if you want to adjust the UI size. (Aside - the Intel MacBook Pros with discrete GPUs could save battery power by running off the integrated GPU - connecting an external display was one things that forced them to fire up the discrete GPUs). If I were running multiple 4k or higher external screens I'd want the bigger GPU and extra RAM of a pro or max chip anyway.
I love DisplayLink via the ThinkPad dock I’m using at the office. With it, my Intel MBP can run 2 4k displays at 60 Hz together with the internal display using the integrated GPU rather than the very power hungry dedicated GPU required without the DisplayLink.
I am experiencing zero lag and the same clarity and color fidelity as I do with TB to DP/HDMI without DisplayLink via Apple’s converters and the OWC TB4 dock (which I am keeping only for the 10 GbE😅).
Well it seems 2.5 is becoming the norm but the only 10 GbE dock I know of is the quite nice OWC one. It does eat up 10 Gb of the 40 Gb provided by TB3/4, and supposedly there are some economic considerations, too…