Can the new MacBook / MacBook Pro Support Dual EXTERNAL Monitors

Solution 1:

There is some advice on doing this here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=214102

I think the consensus is that natively it is not supported, but additional hardware can be purchased to enable it.

Solution 2:

http://www.villagetronic.com/vidock/index.html

The ViDock Grfx is $500 list; I believe it's now starting to ship (I had signed up to pre-order and got a mail a few weeks ago saying they had them in limited quantity).

This requires the MacBook Pro--it uses the ExpressCard 34 slot.

(I have no experience with the product other than eagerly awaiting for it to come out--but it took so long I gave up and bought a Mac Pro; plus I really needed more than 4 GB of RAM.)

Solution 3:

I tried the Matrox DualHead2Go but it did not work at maximum resolution with my HP LP2465 screens. Specifically, http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/dh2go/resolution/digital/resolutions.html indicates the max resolution requires a refresh rate of 58Hz. The GeForce 8600M GT on my MacBook Pro only offers 60Hz on these LP2465s. I'm a little fuzzy on who the guilty party is here, but I do know I could not get a clean image. If anyone from Apple is reading, more and more people use their MacBook Pros as their primary workstations because they are already more than enough power to do most development or even graphics work. But the screen real-estate still suffers. I can think of no more urgently needed feature than support for two simultaneous external monitors. Give me that and I will have the perfect workstation.