M2 MacBook Air | INSTANTLY connect 4K monitors

when you feel crunched towards space on your single laptop screen you reach for an external monitor solution I've got no problem plugging in my MacBook Pro into two monitors either directly by using two USB C to DisplayPort cables or by using one Thunderbolt cable going to a dock and then to the monitors you can now freely drag Windows between the main laptop screen and the other two monitors giving you so much more real estate space that you don't even know what you're gonna do now that was a MacBook Pro what about the MacBook Air based on the comments that I've seen on my MacBook Air reviews it's the lack of multiple monitor screen support that keeps you away from considering the MacBook pair it's the biggest drawback ah just one what about this one and this is the problem now I know what you're gonna say there's been a lot of workarounds and people have tried different things but the problem is I've never actually tried it myself because I use a MacBook Pro so I can plug in the monitors just like this no problem and this little device is supposed to help me overcome my MacBook Air problem [Music] I don't know but I'm gonna link to this thing down below as well as this knife this thing is my favorite knife I love this thing this is it huh we've got three usbas a display port and an HDMI and another HDMI okay so for the first display you can use either DP DisplayPort or HDMI and for the second display only HDMI or DP it's on this side and you got ethernet too just in case no USBC though that's kind of a bummer but you can connect it through USBC to the actual machine alright so let's unplug this guy this is the OWC Thunderbolt dock by the way I really like this thing it's really powerful it's got Thunderbolt 4 but it does not handle this situation which hopefully this little device will let's plug that in so I'm going to use HDMI plugged in the first one but it hasn't come on yet no signal do I need to do anything here what's going on I got nothing I got a big old no signal all right let's try the other side nothing no signal on that one too you're gonna make me read instructions come on it says you need to download the drivers here we go I feel very cozy and comfortable doing this by the way not really the licensing agreement uh where uh they might take your soul I actually don't know if they're gonna take your soul or not don't don't quote me on that agree install give my passwords to my soul okay now I don't think we're done yet oh whoa whoa did you see that these things came on oh okay people this thing officially Works let's rearrange these so my main display is gonna be here this one's gonna be to the left and this one is a little bit to the right that matches the picture right now we're only getting 1920 by 1080 but what if we go up to here 4K whoa It's handling it refresh rate goes up to 60 but that's just because the monitor supports only up to 60. hey look at that it's working so when I'm moving the window I'm seeing some smudges going on here and I'm not a big fan of smudges it's not super smooth it's enough to kind of look at I do wonder if I get a display port cable if it's going to be a little bit better on one of these it is usable so why is it that the OWC dock can't do it and this giggy dock can well it has to do with the technology known as display link is not to be confused with display port which is the connection type on your monitor display link is a technology that lets you send a video signal to a display over USB or Wi-Fi instead of HDMI or display port and it requires special software which is what I just installed on my MacBook Air and also special Hardware a chip that lives inside this little box the software compresses the data to be sent to the monitor the data is sent to the dock via USB and the chip inside here decompresses the data and sends it off to the monitor either via HDMI or DisplayPort Now display link has been around long before Apple silicon Max and they claim to have Pixel Perfect Graphics from what I'm seeing here it's not bad but I wonder how system performance will be affected or if I can notice any drawbacks I am noticing that my mouse is kind of lagging a little bit so um I don't know what's going on there I do have an external Mouse this is the GPU history and this is what it looked like before I plug these two in and this is what it looks like now so definitely quite a lot of GPU usage going on right now I'm gonna run my Benchmark for machine learning on the GPU this is not going to be a definitive result just so you know if you want to see that I made a video on that recently I'll link to it down below this is going to be more of a torture test because uh I don't think this machine is going to like it too much oh yeah so my mouse is barely moving by the way this is a base model MacBook Air eight gigabytes of RAM 256 gigabytes of storage and we're completely maxing out the GPU right now you can drag that over there drag that over here definitely getting some bugs like slow downs weird freezes as I'm dragging the window alright here is the result 86.89 it's actually not bad um the score I got without everything plugged in was 89 for the GPU and I explained more about what that means in the other video but basically that means that it's not having that much of a detrimental effect on the GPU maybe the overall usage is up in general but you still get those spikes of availability when you need it the main screen is still just as usable as before and you have two extra screens this is actually not bad I kind of dig this wow this thing is really really warm too but that's probably just something that can be managed something I missed uh this does say power delivery 100 Watts through USBC on the box and I found what that is there is a USBC port on the side of this thing I also have a DisplayPort cable and I'm going to see if there's a difference in image quality yes there is a difference in the image quality when you're using a DisplayPort cable instead of the HDMI cable but that's not any different than what I see from my MacBook Pro when I use DisplayPort to the monitor it actually looks better than HDMI to the monitor but as far as the jankiness and the usability you're still getting 60 hertz refresh rate so it's still going to be choppy just like it used to be now on the MacBook Pro with the external displays you're still limited to the refresh rate of the external displays it's not going to help you out that you're using a MacBook Pro or not is the jankiness related to the device or is it related to the fact that this is a base model MacBook Air well I'm gonna shut this one down because I've got another MacBook Air here that has 24 gigabytes of RAM and we're gonna see if we get the same result here it's a bit smaller than the other one this is a 13 inch but it should do the trick the a gigabyte machine was maxed out and had four gigabytes of swap being used because I had all sorts of software running on a xcode Docker Etc on this 24 gigabyte model I'm using the same software it's using 14 gigabytes of RAM with no swabbing consequently there's no freezing of the mouse here leading me to conclude that this was in fact a ram issue on the 8 gigabyte model does this thing do what it's supposed to do it does it doesn't give you the Thunderbolt 4 options like you would get with the OWC dock but it does have lots of display options if that's what you need if you got a MacBook Air and you desperately need two external monitors this might be a good solution for for you now what about that price not the cheapest thing you'll ever find there's lots of 20 and 30 dollar docs out there but this one is not that cheap now of course there's other functions that this dock offers like super speed USB does anybody even say that anymore each one of the three USB a ports on this thing has a 10 next to it so 10 gigabyte transfer rates and the ethernet port not labeled one gigabit Ethernet not the craziest speed either but it has it so you don't need any special extra adapters when you want to plug in the ethernet and get faster speeds than Wi-Fi or if that's your only option so overall it does what it says it does and you're gonna pay for it but it's still cheaper than the Thunderbolt 4 dock from OWC hopefully you found this interesting and useful if you did go ahead and give this video a like I really appreciate it thank you for coming and I will see you in the next video [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Alex Ziskind

Views: 225,171

Keywords: apple, macbook, macbook air, macbook air 15, air 15, apple silicon, 13 vs 15, 15 vs 13, m2 macbook, m2 air, m2 macbook air, programming, programmers, software development, software developers, macbook 2022, 2022 macbook, 2022 macbook air, m2 macbook air review, m2 macbook air 2022, new m2 macbook air, macbook air m2, macbook air m2 review, m2 macbook air 256gb, m2 macbook air 256 gb, monitors, monitor for macbook, macbook monitor, monitors for macbook, macbook air monitors

Id: KLI65HnvNMg

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023