I have two Macbook Pros:
- 14" M4 Pro (company)
- 16" M4 Max (personal)
I work remote full-time and recently purchased 2 of the new Studio Display XDRs. Everything works perfectly however I chose to connect them to the M4 Max. I have a caldigit Element TB5 hub and can daisy chain both monitors through that perfectly.
With that said, no matter how I plug them into the M4 Pro I can only ever get one to light up at a time.
What I have tried to resolve it:
- Plug them in individually to the m4 pro
- Plug them in one at a time, force them to 60hz and then plug them both in.
- Daisy Chaining the displays
- Daisy Chaining the displays through the TB5 Hub
Nothing works. Only one display comes on and its whichever is plugged in first. I have even tried lowering the refresh to as low as it goes on both manually then plugging them back in. Still nothing.
From what I am reading it appears to be that the M4 Pro has 3 display lanes and when I plug the first studio display XDR it is using 2 lanes. If I go down to 60hz which is what the original studio display was, then it should theoretically go down to 1 display lane allowing a second to be plugged in. A bunch of people had the older studio display running 2x 5k ASD monitors on the M4 Pro.
Now with the latest Studio Display XDR I am stuck. I was researching possibly editing the EDID of each to mimic the older studio display, but I don't know how to do that easily without BetterDisplay and right now I have no ability to install that. There is a chance I can get approval to run commands / BetterDisplay to get this working if a solution can be found.
What I think the ultimate fix is for the firmware / macOS to realize the limitation, force the studio display XDR to 60hz when a second monitor is plugged in and they both would work. A single Studio Display XDR could run 120hz, but immediately upon plugging a second one it swaps to 60hz. I am completely fine with that scenario.
I have found a few discussions about this topic with the main one being on apple discussions:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256262701?sortBy=rank&answerId=261888577022
Someone sort of gave me this idea on Mac because they were trying to use the studio display XDR on windows and it appears to have worked with cloning an older ASD EDID on the new model:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1s3ani5/got_studio_display_xdr_working_on_windows_pc_5k/
I don't really know what else to do. I opened a ticket with support. Case # 102853480566, but it went no where. I got disconnected during the first call after describing everything and when they reached back out they didn't even give me 2 seconds to pick up and they hung up and closed the ticket.
I really don't want to return the displays because they are beautiful and work beautifully on the m4 max. They should work with 60hz on the m4 pro.
Who / How / When can we get this resolved? I would be happy to work with an Apple dev / engineer to help resolve this.