MacBook Pro 13" M1 Dual Monitors using Dell D6000

I have a D6000 that i just tried with a M1 Mac Mini. What a pain. First of all, everything seems to be working on the dock just fine except the displays. I already went to Display Links website and downloaded the 1.3 Update that has Native M1 support. I thought it should be plug and play then. But no. You have to launch the software it installs first and add a Screen Recording permission (which is how Display Link works, or at least how it works in Big Sur). Then theres a utility that runs in the Menu Bar. You can open that and say to Run At Login. But theres a catch. It doesn't work at Login which for a Mac Mini is a problem, for you might not be depending on your use case. Either-way they have a link to install the Login Screen Extension right there in the utility. That works. The only other issue i have is if i shut the computer down. Turn it back on. I have to reseat the cable to get it to negotiate the Displays again. I suspect this kind of problem might not immediately present itself to laptop people or people that never turn their computers off.

Honestly the only reason i'm using the D6000 right now is cause i brought the M1 to work to finish setting it up. Once you get it setup it works just like my 2017 15" MBP does with Display Link and the D6000. Its mostly for Office work stuff.

Sorry for the rant, but yes, the D6000 works with M1.

I was initially hogging both USB-C ports on my M1 MBP (one for charging and one for a single external display) until I discovered that my Dell D6000 dock supports DisplayLink. Right now, everything works fine EXCEPT for DRM issues. I can't play Netflix whenever it detects I have an external display connected (regardless if the external display is directly connected via USC-C or through the dock via DisplayLink). The video actually plays fine because I can see subtitles including sound, but I only get a black screen.

This only happens in Safari. I can play Netflix videos just fine in Chrome, with or without an external display connected.

This would have been fine, but Chrome on MacOS doesn't support video qualities over 1080p, but Safari does. I also prefer using Safari over Chrome if I can help it. Issue also persists in other websites like Udemy, etc. Hopefully Apple fixes this DRM issue soon. It's been a huge pain in the ***.

I’d you only plan to use one external monitor with an M1 laptop, don’t buy a DisplayLink Dock. Buy a Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C dock for it - that is if you need a dock.

The monitor outputs on a DisplayLink dock use the DisplayLink technology, which leverages the CPU cycles on the computer instead of leveraging the GPU. DisplayLink image quality will always be inferior to the GPU image quality.

However, If you need to use more than one external display on an M1 MacBook Air /MacBook Pro, then you should buy a DisplayLink dock because that’s the only way to have more than one external display on an M1 MacBook Pro/ MacBook Air. I would also recommend to connect your primary monitor directly into one of the M1 Mac’s USB4/TB3 ports to leverage the M1’s GPU for sending image to the primary external display. Then connect your DiplayLink dock into the M1 Mac’s other USB4/TB3 port and connect your secondary, tertiary, etc. displays to video outputs of the DisplayLink dock.

I copied this setup (Dell D6000) with my M1 MacBook Pro and 2 HP Z27 4K monitors and it works great with both monitors running at 3840x 2160 , 60 Hz. There’s also no noticeable impact to the M1s performance.

Has anyone found any work around to the HDCP video content turning into a black screen? I can’t see any content from Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Prime when it’s plugged into the dock.

No problems here.

I have my M1 mac plugged into my 4k Dell U3219Q via Thunderbolt (so driven by the M1 graphics) and I then have the Dell D6000 plugged into the U3219Q (Via USB3). The D6000 then drives my 1080P Dell U2414H using DisplayLink over a displayport cable.

Amazon video plays fine on both.

Waiting for the updated drivers to use my U2414H in portrait. For anyone reading don't try to change rotation or it will cause serious system stability issues and you can't get around it without changing the ports your cable is plugged into between the D6000 and your displaylink display.

DisplayLink technology creates a "fake" display buffer in RAM, sends the data out over a slower interface to a stunt box with DisplayLink custom chips that put that data back onto a "legacy" interface. It is not a true "accelerated" display, and it suffers from lagging.

It may be acceptable for a second display showing slow-to-change data such as computer program listings, stock quotes, or spreadsheets, but NOT for full motion Video, not for Video editing, and absolutely not for gaming. Mouse-tracking on that display can lag, and can make you feel queasy.

In a pinch, it may even play Internet videos without (as one user put it) "too many dropped frames".

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It is really nice to know that you can use a DisplayLink display if you MUST have an additional display for some of the types of data I mentioned. But that is NOT the same as the computer supporting a second, built-in, Hardware-accelerated display.

These displays depend on DisplayLink software, and are at the whim of Apple when they make MacOS changes. There have been cases where MacOS changes completely Borked DisplayLink software, and it took some time for them to recover.

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I think the Big Surprise for a lot of Hub/Dock buyers is that they thought they were getting a "real" display, but actually got a DisplayLink "fake" Display. If you got what you expected in every case, I would not use such pejorative terms to describe DisplayLink.

Agreed, if you have it try it. I should have clarified, it works great for me, but I use it for looking at browsers, spreadsheets, databases, VNC, Remote Desktop, work stuff. I have used video, I don't notice any problems or lag, but I don't use it for home theatre. Displaylink will probably be less than optimal for games because of how it work, but if you are using a Mac as your gaming platform, I am not sure the DisplayLink stuff will bother you or interfere too much. For gaming you could also switch back to direct HDMI or DP video and skip the dock.

Yes you can. I am running this setup at home as we speak. Works great. You just have to install the display link drivers.

With the release of Big Sur 11.3 on April 20, 2021, Apple fixed all the issues with DP1.4 monitors.

So, at this point using DisplayLink docks for connecting to DP1.4 monitors to alleviate M1 issues with DP1.4 monitors is no longer required. One will still have to use a DisplayLink dock if more than one external monitor is required with an M1 MacBook Air/ MacBook Pro.

You should try it out on an M1 MacBook, the implementation for this architecture actually works quite well and seems quite fast to me. Non DRM video and YouTube playback without dropped frames as far as I can tell and my experience has been excellent so far. What you state regarding displaylink is true in a conceptual sense with respect to how the technology operates, but there are caveats here to differentiate from what you may have experienced in the past on Wintel displaylink setups or even older Intel Macs; The M1 MacBooks have a unified memory architecture for RAM which is different compared to Intel models and also note that displaylink has a few different generations in chips too, the latest supports 4k but on their website I saw older devices that are limited to older USB speeds and 1080p. There's a few others that have tried out displaylink on an M1 Mac and their experiences and YouTube videos correlate strongly to what I have experienced performance wise.

I believe so yes - the dock will not pass through the display to the MB graphics, and so is using software drivers to run the display instead (which relies on display link). Better to get a non-display=link dock.

I think that what you are saying here is historically true. However, Apple's implementation for driving external displays on the M1 architecture is currently nothing short of dismal. Not only are there endless issues with driving displays reliably, alongside repeated crashes, incompatibilities with DisplayPort 1.4 and intermittent kernel panics, Apple itself has acknowledged unresolved issues and we are still waiting for a formal resolution.

For people within the M1 ecosystem, it is reasonable then to assert that the DisplayLink suite of products may actually be a superior option when compared to the issued faced by using Apple's own implementation.

I, historically, have been extremely critical of DisplayLink due to its noticeably inferior performance, however, as someone who has essentially lost the last two months of productivity due to Apple's disgusting excuse for a "standard for graphics performance" my only two options are to repurchase an Intel MacBook or use a third-party DisplayLink solution.

It is the best solution of a bad range of options, but still a solution.

The standard Apple uses is that display output should be PERFECT cinema quality, i.e, you could use that output for producing/showing major motion pictures at a cinema. ANY dropped frames or ANY partial scan-line dropouts due to underruns are completely unacceptable under that standard.

Under ideal conditions, DisplayLink displays may produce a picture that is pleasing enough for you, but still falls FAR short of what Apple uses as its standard.

That’s unfortunate. What setup/configuration are you trying, and not able, to get working?

I went in with my eyes open about having one external display option, but the M1 drives my 4K dell u3219k beautifully and displaylink with a dell d6000 gives me another monitor which I wasn’t expecting. I would usually like to run this other monitor in portrait, perhaps that will be provided in a future update.

so far I have had a month of great productivity with the M1 and will upgrade later in the year when the new one comes out.

i’m not sure what you are adding to the conversation that hasn’t already been said?

if you just need another display for information work and it works... even if it is media, then it’s up to the user to define what is acceptable.