Mac-to-Mac Luna Display
Luna Display (via Matt Ronge):
But Mac-to-Mac is more than just taking your old Macs out of retirement — use it as a way to make yourself more mobile! Luna was made with nomadic workers in mind, and with Mac-to-Mac Mode, you can have even more freedom and flexibility to work on the go.
For example, if you have an iMac at your office, and a laptop that moves with you between work and home, pair your laptop with your iMac when in the office to make use of both devices. Or if you’re just working from home, pair your laptop to your iMac or Mac Mini and harness the power of those super computers from your comfy sofa.
Watch for Mac-to-Mac AirPlay in macOS 10.16. I’m only sort of kidding. In any case, this seems like it could be much better than using Screen Sharing.
Boom! @siracusa’s dilemma solved: a new Mac Pro connected to an iMac through the LunaDisplay dongle. No crappy LG monitor, no horribly expensive XDR Display.
Previously:
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@Liam Right, the use case that you mention is like the regular Luna display, treating an extra device as a dumb screen. So, not like screen sharing. The other case that I quoted says that you can use a desktop Mac from your laptop on a sofa. So in that case it sounds like the laptop becomes the main display of the desktop Mac. This is like screen sharing, but because the desktop Mac is treating it as an actual display, the resolution will match exactly.
a new Mac Pro connected to an iMac through the LunaDisplay dongle. No crappy LG monitor, no horribly expensive XDR Display.
Right. Just a horribly expensive iMac display.
You can get 4K displays below $300, but the pixels are slightly too large to be considered “Retina”.
What will most businesses with a Mac that needs an external display (that includes plenty of MacBooks that need additional monitors and/or are run in clamshell mode) do? They sure as hell won’t spend $700 on LG’s UltraFine 4K, let alone $1300 on the UltraFine 5K or even more on an iMac, just so the experience is a little nicer.
The XDR display makes sense for a niche that Apple is trying to address. (It would’ve made more sense, and have had far less negative perception, if they had introduced it at something like NAB.) For everyone else, there still, seven years after Retina came to the Mac, isn’t a reasonable solution to external displays.
Couple that with macOS Mojave and beyond largely abandoning subpixel rendering (which is particularly noticeable on on-Retina displays), and the experience isn’t great.
Siracusa’s dilemma might be solved for someone willing to spend ungodly amounts of money on a Mac Pro, but for everyone else, not so much.
"Right. Just a horribly expensive iMac display."
Well, if you already have a retina iMac, you're not spending any additional money on a display for the Mac Pro.
And, you can probably still use the iMac, at least for things like server processes or shared files.
"the pixels are slightly too large to be considered “Retina”."
Sorry, that post is just too fussy to take seriously given that it's talking about a completely arbitrary nonsense marketing term like "retina".
Get a Dell 2415q and run it at something above 1920x1080. Good enough.
Sounds to me like Mac-2-Mac is not addressing the same use case as Screen Sharing. Screen Sharing let's you connect the GUI of a remote Mac either as your login or attach to the GUI session of another person once there you are running as if you were at the console of that machine.
Mac-2-Mac sounds like it will allow you to fire up an unused Mac with display and have the display attached to your local Mac, as if it was a dumb screen - you don't use the resources on the screen donor Mac other than to run the agent.
Cheers, Liam