djames4242

brian green said:

BGeek said:

Any idea why Apple does not have a store in downtown Seattle? Seems like every other major city has a Apple store downtown.

No idea.  It's only the fastest growing city in the region.  Maybe they think the small stores in Alderwood Mall, and Bellevue Square are "good enough".  

University Village is much closer to downtown than either of those, and Apple is building a brand new, much larger store adjacent to its current location.

Frankly, however, I'm not sure how convenient downtown stores are. I'm picking up a brand new iMac this weekend in Portland and choose Bridgeport (15 miles south) over the downtown location because I don't want to have to pay to park in a lot two blocks away carrying a $3000 computer back to my car. The store at University Village has a parking garage about 100 feet away from it with ample, free parking. The lots at Alderwood and Bellevue Square are only slightly less convenient, yet still free, unlike nearly every other downtown.

docno42 said:

djames4242 said:

 Best I can do is unplug one of those monitors and plug it in to my DisplayPort with a DVI adapter. 

If they are recent Dell monitors, there's a good chance they have native Display Ports on them and a few even have two.  If so, you can chain monitors with Display Port.  

Also the recent generations of MacBook Pro's should be able to drive two monitors directly.  If you have two Thunderbolt ports you have two Display Ports too.  

Sadly these are fairly low-end monitors that have VGA and DVI inputs only. Also, I'm still rocking an early-2011 MBP, so I'm only able to drive a single monitor. Next year I'll finally upgrade my aging machine and then I'll be able to take advantage of multiple external displays, although I am hoping there will be a fix for this issue long before then.

This year is the year my mid-2011 Mac Mini is finally replaced (with an iMac) since it's my more heavily used machine.

I've been able to run Macs for work because of the ability to virtualize Windows. Not sure this bodes well for the future of Macs in certain business segments unless emulation performance under these new chips will be acceptable.

Unfortunately, as MacOS now supports eGPU, support for USB-based displays has been lost. My company invested heavily in Targus USB docks which use DisplayLink to drive two external monitors (on top of Ethernet, audio, and other USB devices). It's a reasonable way to allow all the crappy HP and Dell laptops they provide as well as those of us who use Macs. As of 12.13.4, the DisplayLink drivers ceased to function (everything else with the dock still works, however). My understanding is that Duet and Air Display also no longer work (at least over USB; I haven't read anything about Wi-Fi yet).

DisplayLink acknowledged the problem back when the first beta was released, but has not been able to provide a fix.

Mike Wuerthele said:

It isn't bad. Anybody who says that High Sierra is the worst ever either hasn't been using computers long, or has a very short memory.

We've been asked for this, so we delivered.

There are legitimate reasons to downgrade. Critical peripherals not working after a driver hasn't been updated, expensive vertical market software breaking, that kind of thing. Everybody else should upgrade, if they can.

I agree. I've been using High Sierra on my (early 2011) MBP since the early developer betas and have had zero issues with it. At all. I've held off on installing it on my Mac Mini simply because Final Cut Express 3.5 (which is ancient) no longer functions under High Sierra. Installing it under Lion or above required Unix-level commands because the installer was PowerPC, but the application itself ran okay (LiveType and Boris Fonts had issues, however).

I plan on moving to Final Cut X in the next couple of months, at which point I'll upgrade my Mini. Unless you have compatibility issues, I see no reason to hold off on upgrading.