When I first got the Mac M1 I wrote a blog post about my first-month experience with it.

The 13″ Macbook M1 – 1 Month usage review

Update: 19 July 2021 – Resolved some spelling issues, thanks Denise There are a lot of reviews out there from a lot of bloggers and YouTube people which hit the internet shortly after the Apple Macbook M1 was released. What’s it really like to use one? There is a big

Tech Blog Posts – David FieldDavid Field

There was and has been until yesterday one thing which irked me about it when using it at home.

I could only attach one external monitor to it.

Why this irked me, I’ve no idea, I was connecting a Samsung ultra-wide as the second display, so o have had plenty of real estate there, however, I have a 2nd external monitor on the wall. My far cheaper Chromebook can use both, my wife’s 6 yr old HP 2 in 1 can use 2 monitors.. why not this M1?

The answer seems to be in the form of the Pluggable UD6950Z USB 3/0 & USB-C Dual Displayport or HDMI Display docking station.

The link I used to buy this is here (it’s not an affiliate link, I make no money from recommending this)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08WTT184Z?psc=1

This is not your £29.99 multi-port dongle type system, it is in the pricier £150+ bracket, however, it works.

The key difference between this and many other such docks is the method pluggable use to do their DisplayLink as 2 separate ports.

Before plugging anything in however the DisplayLink software needs to be installed.

I had the 1.5 version installed, and at the time of writing all 3 displays came up but in Mirror mode and I couldn’t seem to get them to work independently. Installing the 1.6 Beta on Montaray fixed that problem.

Under Display in Settings, I was able then to set the layout

Which translated into this

I have noted a couple of bugs that I think are more to do with Montaray than the DisplayLinks beta driver.

When rebooting the M1 make sure the dock isn’t plugged in until you have logged in

I have rebooted the M1 a couple of times over the last day and a bit and when doing so the ultrawide won’t be recognised and the displays will only provide mirror capabilities. If I unplug the Dock, reboot/shutdown (either) and then login, THEN plug in the dock it all works fine.

The far-right screen on a couple of occasions has given up displaying virtual screens.

I make heavy use of the Virtual desktops, I noticed that the screen to the far right won’t always let me use them.. a reboot fixes this.

Thoughts

It’s a pricy way to get the multi-screen setup I had on my old mac back again, however, I can promise it works well and between MacOS and Displaylink I think it will only get better.