One of our biggest gripes with the M3 MacBook Pro is that it only lets you connect to one external display at a time. It’s hardly a feature befitting the ‘pro’ moniker and will frustrate anyone who wants to set up a bank of monitors hooked up to their Apple laptop.
There’s some good news, though: that’s all about to change. Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the M3 MacBook Pro will soon receive a software update that enables it to work with more than one external monitor for the first time.
It’s an interesting move, not least because it seems prompted by the unveiling of the new M3 MacBook Air. Unlike the entry-level MacBook Pro, the M3 MacBook Air can connect to two external displays at once (as long as the lid is closed, that is). That created an odd situation where the consumer-focused MacBook Air had better monitor support than the higher-end MacBook Pro, at least on paper.
When 9to5Mac asked Apple why this was, the company responded that it would shortly be updating the MacBook Pro to match the MacBook Air in this regard. Luckily, it appears that the discrepancy won’t last long.
Why has the situation changed?
So why are M3 MacBooks now gaining this ability that they were previously locked out of? Well, it looks like the lid being closed is a key component.
When you shut a MacBook’s lid, its display is turned off. Presumably, that means the M3 chip is not able to drive more than two displays’ worth of pixels, which is what would be required of it if you hook up two or more screens to the MacBook. Interestingly, previous Apple silicon MacBooks could only support a single external display, even with the lid shut.
M3 MacBooks have technically been able to support two displays in the past, it’s just that one of them was on the laptop itself. With the built-in display turned off, you’ll still get support for two displays, but now both of them can be external monitors. In other words, it looks to be a simple software tweak with a little bit of hardware jiggery-pokery.
At least, that’s our best guess. Apple hasn’t revealed when the software update is due to launch, but macOS Sonoma 14.4 is currently in beta, so perhaps it will arrive when that is released to the general public. Whenever it comes, though, it’ll be good news if you’ve been eyeing a multi-monitor workspace for your M3 MacBook.
