Apple seems to be making a lot of display related things difficult lately. This, and Display Stream Compression are two. Just as high refresh and HDR were becoming really mainstream, Big Sur completely broke what was working flawlessly in Catalina (and it has not been fixed as of either 11.5, or the Monterey betas so far - and by completely broke, I mean does not work, at all, for anybody, not just 'some edge case').…
> my Mac Pro happily drove 2 27" 4K monitors in 10 bit color at 144Hz. It's a bit tangential, but I keep seeing people mentioning 4K monitors with high refresh rates on HN, but I've never seen any. Would you care mentioning what make / model those are?
The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
111–120 of 188 posts
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#112Quite literally an insta-buy for me. Tried with an LG HDR 5K Display and it worked perfectly in trial mode. Location mode is everything I've ever wanted from non-Apple monitors with a Mac mini. https://lunar.fyi/#location
Thanks! If you ever notice Location mode is not enough for you, Lunar also supports external light sensors that you can very easily make yourself with the instructions here: https://lunar.fyi/sensor
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#113Does the gamma solution lower the power use like a proper brightness reduction? And if so, by the same amount? Did you ever attempt to reach out to Apple about how this should be implemented on the new kernel? I would hope there's some forum for this kind of question still.
Unfortunately no, Gamma doesnt reduce the power consumption of the LED backlight of the monitor. It may in fact increase power use a bit because rendering black pixels needs more energy to excite the crystals. I haven't contacted Apple because I don't think they are interested in implementing such a thing really. I've written more about why I think that here: https://lobste.rs/s/2zajeu/journey_controlling_external_mo…
One bit of speculation I've read before is that the display brightness on some displays is stored in a cheap EEPROM chip without wear leveling, and constantly writing new brightness values throughout the day will wear it out in a short time span (years)
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#114Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, retrying always fixes the problem. And for the purpose of getting the latest monitor values from time to time to keep the UI in sync, this suffices. I'm more surprised that I2C works at all over the long, thin Thunderbolt cable of my LG. Huge bandwidth going through it for video and the USB hub, lots of current passing through for charging the MacBook at the same time, I'm amazed it works so well.
Is it actually I2C over the Thunderbolt cable? I had assumed it was I2C just between the CPU and video hardware on the motherboard.
It is really I2C over whatever cable you have between your monitor and your computer.
I don’t know how they multiplex it through the Thunderbolt little wires but it does work.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#116Is it a big secret that m1 macs don’t work with external monitors?? The problem has been getting worse with each new forced update. Using my monitor via HDMI and apples 100$ dongle it constantly turns off randomly and will not come back on without unplug and plug back in. Everything else is great but after like 5 updates that claim to fix the issue but still having issues maybe apple should make some notification abo…
My M1 works flawlessly with my usb c LG monitors except for HDR leading to washed out colours.
On the other hand, both my fullspec 2016 and 2019 MBP have days where the displays and usb and Bluetooth hubs freeze every few minutes and I’m watching a the screens go blank and the windows being retiled while I can’t type. The only thing that continues is audio over the 3.5mm port.
So for me, things improved with M1.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#117Is it a big secret that m1 macs don’t work with external monitors?? The problem has been getting worse with each new forced update. Using my monitor via HDMI and apples 100$ dongle it constantly turns off randomly and will not come back on without unplug and plug back in. Everything else is great but after like 5 updates that claim to fix the issue but still having issues maybe apple should make some notification abo…
My M1 works flawlessly with my usb c LG monitors except for HDR leading to washed out colours. On the other hand, both my fullspec 2016 and 2019 MBP have days where the displays and usb and Bluetooth hubs freeze every few minutes and I’m watching a the screens go blank and the windows being retiled while I can’t type. The only thing that continues is audio over the 3.5mm port. So for me, things improved with M1.
Do you mind sharing the exact model number of your LG monitor? And is text as sharp as the Retina display?
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
My M1 works flawlessly with my usb c LG monitors except for HDR leading to washed out colours. On the other hand, both my fullspec 2016 and 2019 MBP have days where the displays and usb and Bluetooth hubs freeze every few minutes and I’m watching a the screens go blank and the windows being retiled while I can’t type. The only thing that continues is audio over the 3.5mm port. So for me, things improved with M1.
Do you mind sharing the exact model number of your LG monitor? And is text as sharp as the Retina display?
Sure: LG 27UL850-W. I can’t say whether it is exactly as sharp but to me it looks similarly sharp. Both scaled and on native resolution. The colours of the M1 screen are better however.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controlling external displays via DDC was never supported, and only works even on Intel Macs via a "private," undocumented API. It's neither appalling nor even surprising that this wasn't prioritized for the M1 kernel, and it is likewise reasonable that some more reverse engineering would be required.
I know it’s not how it’s supposed to work, but I think once an API is used in real world, and sees useful applications that some users rely on it day to day, it should be seen as “public”. I never heard of Lunar before but completely understand the use case, all the more so it doesn’t seem Apple is interested in filling that gap outside of its pro display.
There's no guarantee that Apple even knew that this API was being used.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#120I haven't used Lunar ( https://lunar.fyi/ ), the app the author built, but it looks fantastic! Clearly great effort has been put into it! I really appreciate this class of application that exposes more hardware functionality to the end user. Flux (which may or may not be a direct competitor) is another great example, as is Halide, the pro camera app for iPhones. They're certainly not flashy, but they can be great qua…
It's a great app, giving you iMac like control over your screen brightness. Love it.