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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!
If you stay with the previous release of macOS, YouCanDuet
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.
The latter. And DisplayLink and Apple are already working on a Driver Update.
It's not a "bit" overblown; it's pure hyperbole/clickbait. The monitors are fine, and that includes with MacOS, the issue is that the monitors will no longer work when they are connected through a third party peripheral with drivers that do some encapsulation to send display data (amongst other things) over USB.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Got a new Macbook? It's USB-C only - even for displays. No choice if you have newish Mac hardware...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The reason there’s no mention of DisplayLink is because DisplayLink isn’t part of the system any more than Adobe Flash or other unsupported third-party products are. I suspect that you and many others may be confused and thinking of DisplayPort instead.
DisplayLink is a third-party company that I know as one that produces chips and drivers for use in USB devices that allows those devices (e.g. adapters or hubs) to appear as displays to the computer. I used a USB adapter of theirs to add a third monitor to a computer that only had video outputs for two monitors, and it worked okay for the most part, so long as you didn’t breathe or look at it funny, and so long as you were okay with the advertised 1080p being at about 5-10 Hz, making it suitable for web browsing static pages and not much else. The whole setup was incredibly brittle and seemed as if it was built of top of a pile of hacks, since I had it stop working more than once in the few years that I was using it. Driver updates to my Windows partition would break it. Driver updates to my Mac partition would break it. Driver updates to the device itself wouldn’t always fix it. Occasionally you’d plug it in or just turn everything back on after being off for the night and it just wouldn’t work, even though nothing had changed.
My experience using DisplayLink products years ago was poor enough that I stopped using them as soon as it was practical to do so.
Blaming Apple is a deflection from the real issue: it sounds as if their product is still built on top of a pile of brittle hacks and that their QA is still as poor as it was years ago. I was able to make it work because I was only using it for personal use; I couldn’t imagine anyone trying to use their stuff in a business environment.