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Latest macOS Update Disables DisplayLink, Rendering Thousands of Monitors Dead (displaylink.com)
rh2600 writes: Four days ago, Apple's latest macOS 10.13.4 update broke DisplayLink protocol support (perhaps permanently), turning what may be hundreds of thousands of external monitors connected to MacBook Pros via DisplayLink into paperweights. Some days in, DisplayLink has yet to announce any solution, and most worryingly there are indications that this is a permanent change to macOS moving forward. Mac Rumors is reporting that "users of the popular Mac desktop extension app Duet Display are being advised not to update to macOS 10.13.4, due to 'critical bugs' that prevent the software from communicating with connected iOS devices used as extra displays." Users of other desktop extensions apps like Air Display and iDisplay are also reporting incompatibility with the latest version of macOS.
JustWontDuet
Thanks, I'll be here all week!
Is the external screen hardware bricked beyond repair or simply unusable until some driver software fixed? Dead sounds like click bait if a simple reinstall or patch rollback gets it working again.
One of the commenters in the first link is a perfect example of the blame-everyone-but-Apple mentality:
Yes, blame a peripheral manufacturer for thinking that an update (10.13.3 ->10.13.4) wouldn't do something like break the subsystem that their drivers depend on. Couldn't possibly expect Apple to put some more QA on macOS updates and stop treating the OS like it's a legacy product WRT support.
Dude, I get why you're upset. Your livelihood has just been hit by Apple. However, you should be blaming Apple for doing stupid shit like breaking your drivers in an update and then forcing you to have that particular point release to run an IDE.
You want proof that Apple is now firmly a cult? People would be howling from the rafters if Visual Studio updates required a highly particular set of bleeding edge patches from Microsoft to run. No one outside of the SCADA space would tolerate this level of tied-at-the-hip releasing.
This is why I would never use an Apple product.
. . . from having a single vendor. They see no reason to be compatible - not even with themselves.
Interesting to read the 'permanent change' link. According to hw vendor, the problem is for mac only. Windows/chromebook users are not affected . . .
That used to break stuff every time they updated.
Full circle, eh?
ROFLMAO.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
..It Just Works! So simple a grandmother can use it!
Thousands of white slabs all measuring 1x4x9, have neen spotted floating in orbit
Happy fiftieth to 2001: A Space Odyssey
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I used to run MacOS as my main Desktop OS and run Linux in multiple VMs. When I updated to High Sierra I noticed my MacPro was not as fast as it used to be. With all the hoopla about Apple throttling old iPhones I no longer trusted Apple. I now run Ubuntu 17.10 bare metal on my Macpro. One of my D700's are used for my Virtual machines, the other for the Host OS applications. it's fast! It's a better development environment. I run Simplify3d for my Robo R1+ printer on the native OS. I use my 2nd D700 for a virtual machine that runs Design Spark Mechanical edition. I also use FreeCad natively on Linux. Design Spark really works well. I would like know how to implement an eGPU in Linux on the current 2013 MacPro Black Can hardware. I did a deep dive to analyze how it was done on MacOS, it appears to be a PCI Tunnel passthrough. When implementing eGPU in Linux I get BAR resource errors. Has anyone implemented eGPU in Linux on a 2013 MacPro Black Cylinder Desktop ? I am willing to bet that If your Apple hardware has slowed down after an update, and your hardware checks out fine, chances are Apple is up to no good and trying to encourage you to update your hardware. I'm hoping the Linux Video editing tools evolves to the point where all features take advantage of GPU rendering. Once it does I will be able to sell my Final Cut Pro license and be fully done with Apple.
still working like the day it was purchased
Only Apple has the courage to break shit for no reason, and their users love it.
Can you create paragraphs on your Linux MacPro desktop? Sure doesn't seem like it.
Beware of the Leopard.
Commercial Quality Color adjustments.
The reason people pay 1000+ dollars for a monitor is all the professional features that lower end monitors don't have. The most notable of those being color calibration for production quality print and video, where the end user's color adjustment may not matter, but where you need to make sure all pieces of branding, shading, compositing, etc match up perfectly, so there is no artifacting that makes people feel it is unprofessional.
Most of these features are only of interest to a limited professional market which is why the cost rises in multiples of the cost of plain consumer gear. While name brands often price themselves several times higher than they need to, niche companies may price that high simply because they are not shipping enough volume to cover R&D costs and new product developments otherwise.
Can you create paragraphs on your Linux MacPro desktop? Sure doesn't seem like it.
Give him a break. He bought a Trashcan Mac Pro to run Linux. I am seriously concerned about his/her/it cognitive abilities over that decision alone.
Either that or he's a troll, as the iPhone throttling was a trade off between battery capacity and phone performance.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Linux? Installs by a shitty shell script, drivers are not working properly.
OSX? Apple broke that.
Windows: Works without problems so far.
Won't buy displaylink adapters again.
Try Lightworks.
We did this because 1 monitor ought to be enough for anybody.
-- This message was composed on a PC laptop with two external displays connected.
I did the same when I ditched apple half a decade ago with much older hardware, some of their older hardware wasn't bad for the time and runs linux very smoothly. However do not buy their new stuff, it's just not OSS friendly, thankfully PC hardware has caught up in terms of quality (especially in terms of notebooks.)
A slip of paper.
There was really no better description. Formally, the object was called a rectangular membrane-like object: length: 8.5 cm; width: 5.2 cm; slightly bigger than a credit card. It was so thin that its thickness could not be measured. The surface was pure white, looking exactly like a slip of paper.
(From Cixin Liu, Death’s End)
Title is clickbait. It is slashdot so I guess this should be expected.
No monitors are broken. Every last one of them still works fine, including with Apple products.
Apple just stopped playing nice with a 3rd party protocol that has been buggy on OSX for several releases now. DisplayLink is not DisplayPort.
Not sure what the poster is saying, but you donâ(TM)t need the latest os to use the latest Xcode.
The truth of the matter is, DisplayLink driver support for OS X has always been rather shoddy.
I purchased a $100 or so docking station a while back, from "j5create" (who makes a lot of products that specifically claim Mac compatibility). They rely on rebranded/customized DisplayLink drivers to make their video ports on their docks work. When I installed the latest Mac drivers from them for it, I found out that screen rotation wasn't supported -- so I couldn't use my second display that was rotated to "portrait" mode.
I think they *finally* addressed that issue, but I already sold that MacBook and stopped using that dock with it, so I'm not 100% sure?
They had plenty of other issues though, even with the last couple major OS X versions:
https://support.displaylink.co...
Protected video content will never be viewable via a DisplayLink connected monitor either, BTW.
It's really just a partial solution/hack to add a monitor over a port that wasn't originally intended to be used that way. So while it's irritating it's non-functional in the latest OS X release? It was never that great to begin with.....
Back in '85 or '86, all apps compiled with a popular compiler suddenly stopped working because the compiler vendor didn't follow all of the rules in Inside Macintosh.
As a result, all the applications built with their tools also stopped working.
Back in those days, when an app crashed, it usually took your computer with it.
On the bright side, your built-in monitor - the only monitor you had - still worked after a reboot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sounds like Apple has deliberately disabled support for external monitors not controlled by the (a?) GPU. Probably part of the eGPU support, and with an eGPU product to support external monitors over USB-C/Thunderbolt about to be released as well. Disabling those other pesky products would create instant "demand" for their new eGPU product.
I hope it was unintentional, but I seriously doubt it.
Apple is dead.
Does nobody understand this word anymore. No windows didn't "brick" your computer. You booted from some other media and it was functional. Bricked means you connected up a JTAG cable and reloaded firmware. Or in the old days removed the EEPROM and reprogrammed it. If the OS is the only thing not working then it isn't bricked.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Every day I wake up and feel so glad I don't own any Apple products. It's an empowering feeling!
In the good old days, Apple held a patent on all of their connectors. The only way you could make an accessory was to sign all of your IP over to them in exchange for the right to use their IP. I kid you not. I worked for the company that made the chip in all of the multi-button joysticks and this is the reason a product like this never appeared for an Apple. Now that Apple supports a standard connector, they have to be a little sneakier to get everyone's IP. Right now I'll bet they are telling DuetDisplay that they will "help" them get their driver working if only DuetDisplay will sign the rights to their source over to Apple.
Are you sure your last name is not Pournelle and did you rise from the dead on Sunday?
A lots of larger companies use usb docking stations based on the display link chips etc. This allows anyone to dock their laptop with 1 cable and use external screens etc. I can work in any office at any desk irrelevant of my laptop.
If osx updates have disabled compatibility it means that mac laptop users would need to use dedicated mac connection hardware and loose their portability.
This would be a massive problem for industry, except most offices use real computers for work and leave macs for people who just like to be "special".
There is a difference between "that monitor no longer works with this laptop" and "that monitor no longer works, period".
The blurb says something about turning external monitors into paperweights. To me that means "actively broke it and it no longer works, period". That is not the case if it only broke software on the laptop and the monitor still works fine.
That's the equivalent of "the internet is down" because you can't get a website to load.
In both cases I know you mean one of two things, but I don't know which.
If you state it as "effectively turning the monitor into a paperweight" I can assume that it's the latter example and that the monitor just doesn't work with that laptop.
I refuse to sign
ever since since customers stopped caring about corporate ethics
The insane thing is it amounts to "I don't like the dongle that actually works (DisplayPort), I want to use that dongle (DisplayLink)."
Once again, we see customers being burned because they didn't buy products which use the actual DisplayPort over USB-C standard.
Seriously, if you buy half-baked proprietary garbage, expect problems. DisplayLink's proprietary "solution" is wholly dependent on OS drivers, and they can't be bothered to maintain them. They had months to validate their driver works with the beta releases of MacOS; anybody with an Apple Developer account has access to it. DisplayLink's Linux "Driver" is for Ubuntu LTS only, and they have made no effort to release or test for any other release of Ubuntu, let alone any other distribution. Now, it's quite clear they've given MacOS the same amount of attention they give to Linux.
How is DisplayLink's broken driver the fault of anybody except DisplayLink? They didn't follow the DisplayPort standard. Let them lie in the bed they shart.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
The story refers to a “DisplayLink protocol”, which makes it sound like some standard... but it’s a proprietary solution developed by a specific company for controlling a display over USB.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
#DeleteChrome
How the hell would a video driver actually damage a monitor? It sounds like the article is being a bit overblown and really it's that the monitors simply can't work with MacOS anymore (but would work fine on any other computer.)
Back in the day when people had to configure X (or xfree86) manually, there were warnings in the documentation about how the wrong settings could damage your monitor. You see, in the old days, the monitor didn't have any hardware in it to sanitize or limit its inputs. If the driver instructed the video card to send... I think it was refresh pulses, to the monitor at a rate too high for the monitor, it could overdrive the circuits responsible for refreshing the screen. (You know how CRTs work, right? How the incoming data signal includes refresh information telling the inductive ring around the neck of the tube to direct the flow of charged particles coming out of the electron beam gun at the back of the tube, to deflect in such a way as to flick the point of contact of the beam with the backside of the screen horizontally across, with the information to be displayed, (forming one line of the image,) then to go back to the start, iterate down one line, and start again, sweeping from one side to the other, to repeat however many times? Well, there was no circuitry in the monitor or TV set to control or limit how quickly this happened, or to set meaningful parameters on how much energy could be applied either to the gun, (brightness,) or the ring, (coils controlling beam deflection) so yeah, bad drivers COULD in fact cause too much electrical current, and damage those parts, OR direct so much energy at one spot on the monitor that it burns out the phosphors, giving you a permanent fuzzy, discolored, or even black spot on the screen.) It is possible there are other ways the driver (directing the video hardware,) could have damaged the monitor, which I simply can't think of all this time later. The configuration instructions didn't go into this much detail, they mainly stated that...
One, it is possible to damage your monitor if you're not careful, and...
Two, the way in which power is sent to the monitor by your video hardware is determined by what driver the X server is sending digital data to, regarding what the screen is supposed to look like. So...
Three if you use the WRONG driver, due to misidentification of your equipment, or because your specific video card is not supported, it could send what SHOULD BE (but isn't) good information to drive your monitor properly, but it's bad because the signals passed from video card to monitor aren't what the ACTUAL video card and monitor SHOULD have.
I recall something in the config utility (xf86config) that warned that even though the names may be SIMILAR, there could be a world of difference between a GemStar Snail64 Video Graphics Card, and a GemStar Snail64+ Video Graphics Card. (Stuck in my mind because the example name was, I thought, funny, and a nice touch.) I may not be remembering the warning precisely, but it was something along these lines.
Now today, seems like nearly every piece of equipment has its own controller and any DECENTLY MADE piece of computing hardware, a screen, a printer, hell, even a mouse, has been designed not to let information coming to it damage it, or "brick" it. But if it's capable of receiving data, (anything wireless must be, if it features full-duplex communication, which everything does; an example of simplex communication, just by contrast, is a radio station; for anything YOU use with your computer, mostly there's two-way communication, even if only to establish the link. A wireless mouse receives information FROM the computer even though it does nothing you can SEE with that information, but it's necessary so that the computer can know that the information it's receiving from the mouse is actually from THAT mouse, and not from some other device, or for link-management, etc., to get to both be on the same radio channel, or same time
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
If you truly want an easy to use and stable Linux, just install Ubuntu and be done with it. Unless you are going to snipe at what you mean by stable, then that's it. Done!
It has been this way for nearly a decade now (once we got decent Wi-Fi and graphics drivers that was pretty much the nail in the coffin of all arguments for using any other OS, except legacy software and proprietary drivers (which can be solved by people realizing we are customers and not "consumers.")
Isn't that the standard response to corporate crap nowadays?
I'm a long time Duet user and I was using the beta MacOS and I emailed Duet with all the issues I was having and the moment they confirmed I was using the beta I got the email equivalent of hung up on. They are either stupid or they knew this was about to happen and they wanted to squeeze out as many app store sales as they could before going under. I still haven't received an email saying don't upgrade to the new OS, so not sure who they are whispering don't upgrade to.
Again, if memory serves, there were at least two pre-releases of MacBasic interpreters in circulation. The first was pretty much like the BASIC language used with other early-1980s computers, with line numbers.
The second version was more Pascal-like in that it did not require line numbers and it used GOSUB or some variant of it. I do not remember if GOSUB had parameter-passing and, if it did, I do not remember the semantics of how parameters were passed.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The tech industry really has gone to shit in the last five or ten years.
Is it just lack of engineering skill or is it that managers, in chase of ever bigger payouts, have just become more contemptuous of their users?
Something has definitely changed for the worse.
Apple - your boat is taking on water. Fix it.
Sounds like a great time for someone to launch a new computer company. Microsoft sucks, Apple is rapidly changing into a sucky company... time for a new one.