10.13.4 Displaylink no longer working

I am in the same boat. At my company we were using the plugable usbc triple display dock. It worked perfectly with no issues. Wakes from sleep, from closed clamshell etc. We are a smaller company so spending 300 dollars per dock on something like owc usbc dock is expensive for us since we have to get a lot of them. The 300 dollar docks like owc are awesome products but when a dock does the same thing for 150 at half the cost It’s a huge savings. If it doesn’t work well for some products then people can simply not buy them but why make such a huge change on an update rather than in a new OS X upgrade. In an enterprise environment we first dealt with dongles and adapters and now when we found a product that worked for us we have to replace them now. Apple is making it increasingly difficult to integrate their products into a mixed environment. It seems that the company no longer cares what consumers would like to have but just kind of pull these weird moves like the 10.13.4 update. It’s different just using a Mac for yourself at home versus dealing with these issues on an enterprise level.

There are a few things we can do. One is run one display off your dual link adapter and connect another display directly from some of the free ports. The plugable dock I use also charges the Mac so there’s one free port (I have the non touchbar Mac) or you can get a dock that will work but it’s pretty pricey. This dock will work for sure:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3DK13PSG/

The above dock requires no drivers and will also charge your Mac. There are others like this one from elgato and Belkin, but they are all at the 300 price point.

I tried everything I could think of, and I have concluded that Apple knew what they were doing, but didnt care about all the users who relied on the ability to add a third monitor (or more) to their macs. In addition, there will be NO fix to it by apple. Its been known for months now by display link, and nothing is forthcoming. In addition, Apple didnt warn people that thei would happen, as they SHOULD have. Steps to take: 1) Roll back to 10.13.3, and 2) NEVER trust an update from apple again until many moons have passed and all these little tricks have been exposed. I must have spend 10 hours on this problem, and needless to say, I am quite upset that I wasnt warned by apple. It was my fault in that I never should have upgraded and I trusted Apple would never do something like this.

i used an HDMI to display port (mac) adapter. you can find several options on Amazon. that said, it should also work for VGA to display port (mac) or DVI to display port (mac). for me, i searched under HDMI to thunderbolt 2 realized that thunderbolt ports double as display ports and found the cheapest one (actually went to Fry's for it). i think the cheapest on amazon was like... $12.

Yes. I downgraded from 10.13.4 to the previous system using time machine and after 4 hours it was done and I have my monitors back

This is not Apple’s responsibility.

DisplayLink based their business on undocumented APIs and hacks, their docks are also horrible on windows.

DisplayLink’s own site saying 10.13.3 doesn’t work

https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/1812676-macos-high-sierra -mirror-issues

10.13.4 breaks it further.

There's a reason a proper dock costs big $$$. DisplayLink is simply pushing data over USB, software does all the work. You don't get any acceleration and you can't display HDCP protected content, it's only because of relatively beefy hardware that it works.
Now that "driver" stopped working, that happened with first beta of 10.13.4, quite a while ago.

DisplayLink wasn't able to produce a working driver.

And it's Apple's fault... how?

I have a shelf full of unsuported hardware - USB colorimeter with drivers for Win98, a Blackberry cradle that fails to work over USB 2.0 because it used some undocumented glitches that stopped working in recent chipsets, Soundcards that stopped working with WinXP, TV Tuner that apparently only properly worked on one version of Vista... Should I blame Microsoft for not making the drivers? Should I blame Intel for not making their chipsets as quirky as the old ones?

Just because lots of people were tricked into buying junk doesn't mean Apple should go out of its way to support it.

ThisIsPreposterous wrote:

The point is that it was a simple utility that worked flawlessly and was withdrawn without warning.

There was two months of warning. Unfortunately, it appears that the 3rd party developers had used some "creative" techniques to implement their solutions and they were unable or unwilling to make the necessary changes before 10.13.4 was released.

ThisIsPreposterous wrote:

? Do you have some kind of citation for this? I received no warning that this functionality would be removed in 10.13.4

macOS 10.13.4 was first released to developers on Jan. 24th: https://9to5mac.com/2018/01/24/macos-10-13-4-beta-1/

There was a post on the DisplayLink forums about problems with 10.13.4 2 days later: https://www.displaylink.org/forum/showthread.php?t=65890

NDA restrictions would have prevented the developers from warning customers until the build was publicly released.

The creative ways developers implement their solutions does not mean that they were doing anything wrong. Exploiting options and coming up with creative workarounds is a developer's job. Additionally, using an iPad or other device as an external monitor should be functionality Apple encourages. Many businesses depend on being able to do this.

That is correct.

I don't know the specific details of how this external display was implemented. Nor do I know any details of what 3rd party developers are doing to remedy the situation.

I do know that Apple make major changes to the operating system at least twice a year. Those changes always break something. Any 3rd party developer should know that too and should have a realistic assessment of how susceptible their product might be to these changes. I don't think that Apple should be making these kinds of changes, especially on minor point releases.

But who is at fault? The 3rd party developer, for ignoring Apple's history and marketing/releasing a product that any reasonable developer would assume to be at risk of failure due to update? Apple, for making these kinds of major updates with only 2 months of warning? Or users, for ignoring both Apple's history and that of 3rd party developers and blindly clicking through on any notification that appears in the upper right corner? All users should have Time Machine backups too. They might also have APFS snapshots that would allow a restore in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours.

As long as users keep applying updates the day they are released, they keep giving Apple more power over 3rd party developers. Every year, users lose a little bit of power and functionality due to this dynamic. Yet every year, they keep clicking that update button. This year, you lost your DisplayLink drivers. In a few months, you will likely lose a ton of legacy 32-bit apps. Keep clicking that update button!

going to give this a try for my portable: https://www.amazon.com/gofanco-DisplayPort-Thunderbolt-Docking-Ethernet/dp/B0716 JB81J/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=152423…

not at all optimal, but worth a try. i'll update on if it does the trick. using it to go from thunderbolt2 to usb3...