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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.
ROFLMAO.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
..It Just Works! So simple a grandmother can use it!
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.
Only Apple has the courage to break shit for no reason, and their users love it.
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
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.