How many displays can I use with Macbooks.

MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with Apple-silicon-M1: ONE external display, up to the previously unheard of size of 6K.

MacBook Pro 14-in with Apple-Silicon M1 Pro: TWO external displays up to 6K

MacBook Pro 14 or 16-in with Apple-Silicon M1 Max: FOUR external displays up to 6K, AND one additional at up to 4K.

Connection methods:

All of these models have ONE HDMI port capable of driving up to a 4K HDMI displays. HDMI itself is bandwidth limited.

All others need to be connected directly with ThunderBolt or USB-C or with adapters based on those protocols.

If you would like to connect more than one display to a single port, the first device connected must be a genuine Thunderbolt Display or ThunderBolt (NOT just USB-C) Docking device.

The apple-Silicon-M2 (not yet available) appears to have the same capability to drive displays as the M1 original.

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The Apple standard for its built-in hardware-accelerated displays is to be are suitable for production/display of cinema-quality video with NO dropped frames, and NO dropouts or partial-blank scan lines due to memory under-runs or other issues. You can make commercial movies using Apple displays, and some Users do.

Info from Apple: Use one or more external displays with your Mac - Apple Support

Laptops compromise toward portability, and away from expandability, ports, cooling/thermals, and, well, price.

If you want or need lots of displays, Mac Studio with M1 Pro or M1 Max, most likely. Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is just wicked fast.

M1 does two displays, one of which is always the internal on a laptop.

M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra support four, one of which is always the internal on a laptop.

Apple Universal Control and iCloud and related features can make operations with an iPad seamless, which might work for your portability requirements; a mid-range desktop and an iPad Pro (for display, touch and pencil input, and portability) might well price out cheaper than a loaded laptop. This if you don’t specifically need, for instance, Xcode on the road.

The 2020 Apple-Silicon M1 13-in MacBook Pro and Air are extremely-capable entry-level computers. They can support the internal display AND an External display up to the previously unheard of size of the Apple 6K display at billions of colors. But only ONE in addition to the internal display.

This may not match the way older computers forced you to work, since older computers were not able to support a really large external display. But it is NOT a defect. The spec was available long before you could purchase the computer.

when you choose a MacBook Pro, you pay dearly for the stunning builtin display, the portability, and the ability to run the computer using only its battery.

Once you attach a large external display(s), you will be using NONE of those features for which the device is optimized.

You may be better served by a desktop Model Mac.

DamagedDingo wrote:

Unfortunately, I require a laptop. I did expect a bit more, my XPS 15 9550 runs 3 24" 1080p monitors fine and it is from 2016.

I was hoping to get apple this time so that I could also use it for development but it seems it is still too far behind the market.

A detail I’m unsure you’re aware of: Apple is now using Apple silicon Arm AArch64 ARMv8 processors, and not Intel x86-64 processors.

If you’re thinking of running Microsoft Windows here for instance, there’s no supported Windows version available for Apple silicon processors (yet?), though some folks are (successfully) using an Insider Arm version. Windows x86-64 will not work (well) here, as that’ll require emulation.

This beyond the numbers of external displays…