Portable External MacBook Pro Displays
Luna Display seamlessly extends your Mac desktop to your iPad, creating a wireless second monitor with stunning image quality. Available for Mini DisplayPort or USB-C, Luna sets up in seconds and instantly works with your existing Wi-Fi.
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Luna Display acts as a complete extension to your Mac, allowing you to use it directly from your iPad with full support for external keyboards, Apple Pencil, and touch interactions.
Via Craig Hockenberry:
I’ve had two displays on my development machines since the 1990’s. By now, it’s fully ingrained in my habits and makes for a very efficient workflow. So much so that it’s the capability I miss the most when I travel, especially when I have an iPad with a kick-ass display. It’s not hyperbole to say that this new product, called Luna Display, solves this problem completely.
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When you put the Luna Display app into the background with the iPad’s home button, the display disappears from the Mac after a few minutes. All iOS apps have a limited time in the background and Luna Display is no different.
It looks cool to have a wireless connection, with only a little dongle plugged into the Mac. But it can also work with a USB cable, which I expect is much more reliable.
That said, this is not particularly helpful for me because I have an iPad mini. I wanted a larger, portable external display for my MacBook Pro, so a few months ago I got an AOC e1759Fwu. It’s a 17-inch display with a fold-out stand that easily fits in my laptop backpack. It connects via a USB cable (no separate power connector) and, once you install the kernel extension, the Mac sees it as a regular external display (though Night Shift is not supported). It supports both portrait and landscape modes. I prefer the portrait, which at 900 × 1,600 pixels (it’s not Retina) is the same height as a 30-inch display.
The AOC’s USB 3 connection is a big improvement over the square-SCSI SuperMac adapter that I once used to connect a color display to my monochrome PowerBook, but it does feel laggy compared with a regular display connector. The picture quality isn’t great, either: a bit fuzzy, uneven brightness, and so-so color. But it succeeds at giving me more screen space when traveling. The extra vertical pixels are especially welcome when replying to customer e-mails in FogBugz. The main downsides are that it’s an extra step to unpack it and repack it and that some hotels don’t really have enough table/desk space to set it up. It would be better if Apple sold a MacBook Pro with a larger internal display.
Previously: Duet Display.
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It seems that primary reason to use Luna and Astropad in general it to have touch screen on the mac, especially touch screen with the Pencil support. It works great actually, I like it, and I use my 12.9" iPad as a second screen on the road sometimes, but that is not as smooth as I hoped.