Dual Legacy Thunderbolt 2 Displays Not Supported on the M1 Mac Mini
Like most in this community I love Apple products and have used them for over 10 years or more. During that time hardware has evolved and we collate monitors and repurpose them as we upgrade our computers or laptops.
I like many read the tech specs and called Apple but could not get a definitive answer as to why the Mini M1 does not support dual Thunderbolt displays, especially when they only take 4K of the 6K available.
I've spent the best part of a day fiddling with this having had 2 x Apple 27" Thunderbolt Displays working happily on my Mid 2015 - 15 " Mac Book Pro - (well not so happy, it throttles due to the heat and noisy fans of the Intel era just give you a head ache).
My finding so far are that the Mac mini M1 can support only a single Thunderbolt Display on both ports individually but not at the same time. Sometimes it displays on left another on the right. (I Purchased 2 adapters to try this).
I also have at Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt cable so I removed one adapter and monitor and added the cable to daisy chain. This actually gave me some interesting results of which I found by accident.
If a mouse is plugged into the daisy chained monitor, even though the display is black the mouse is working.
Also Music plays from the black monitor and not the display that is working.
Therefore the conclusion is that only the Video signal is some how blocked.
My assumption is that Apple are restricting this via software so that no more than 6K video can be drawn on the channel.
If this is software related we should all lobby Apple technical support to fix this.
Not everyone needs the latest greatest displays and generally the older Apple Displays in my opinion are a much better aesthetic design.
If anyone has any ideas how to solve this please reach out here.
Even if there is a hack to the monitor itself.
I have looked at the HDMI to USB-c dongle that is on YouTube but as far as I can see in the comments does not work.
As far as I see also there is not HDMI out (Male) to Thunderbolt 2 cable (in to Monitor) available and technically the signals are very different.
Apple please help the environment by making these legacy displays work with your new hardware.
