Not to pile on, but my MBP (with "TouchBar" which will assuredly not exist in another year) is always in clamshell mode and connected to two external LG 4K displays. Whether, on which screen(s), or in what state the Mac wakes each morning is completely random. Sometimes it doesn't wake at all. Sometimes I have artifacts on one screen and a desktop on another screen. The sleep/wake sequence is a complete mess, and it doesn't surprise me that the focus might sometimes be on apps running in the user session behind the lock screen.
Wow, I have similar issue. I have an acer 4k monitor at home with both HDMI and Display Ports. I used to use HDMI before to connect it to my 15inch 2016 MBP, and the mac used to crash very often. Close the mac, and connect the dongle with hdmi? crash. So I'd have to restart the mac, and connect the monitor while keeping it open, and then close. But once i disconnect the monitor - crash.
I then got a usb c/thunderbolt to display port for 4k 60fps, and the issues significantly dropped, but it still occasionally happens.
I've noticed this crash as well. i've my MacBook Pro connected to an external monitor via an USB-C/Thunderbolt cable. I close my laptop when I leave work which would put it to sleep/lock and approx. 10% of the time when I come back the next day my machine wouldn't wake up and I've to do a hard restart. I can see some things flashing on my screen but the laptop screen would be completely blank.
Same problems as you, but I disagree on the touchbar. It’s one of the better things Apple has added recently.
But holy hell do they need to work on their external monitor support. Yesterday I had one of my monitors randomly go black for a second. I’ve had audio over usbc just not show up anymore and it refusing to see my gigabit ethernet when waking up unless I unplug the actual ethernet cable. Simply amazing this passed their QA - and Id find it hard to believe no one at Apple uses clamshell mode with two monitors.
> but I disagree on the touchbar. It’s one of the better things Apple has added recently.
Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as "better" than hardware keys. Maybe if they moved it above the FN row and we regained the hardware escape key, while making it a build to order option. Even then, I personally would have no interest in it, and neither would anyone else I know. I do not want to look at my hands while I type, ever.
I don't know how far out it would be but with the changes to their keyboard and the addition of their touchbar I wonder if their long term plan is a touch screen in the bottom half to replace the keyboard and pad. Without some kind of tactile interface I hope I'm wrong about my suspicions.
Ah, but you see when Apple release the iTouch it'll be a whole new paradigm of human-computer interaction! Never before have people been able to control their computers by touching the screens!
> Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as "better" than hardware keys.
I hope this is hyperbole, because it shouldn't be hard to understand. The TouchBar is absolutely an improvement. I can't remember the last time I actually used a laptop keyboard's F-keys for anything, but the TouchBar makes that space useful.
Funny, I actually tested Chrome before commenting just to make sure it wasn't doing something weird, and F5 definitely doesn't reload Chrome on my computer.
My touch bar computer still has an Esc key. It's part of the touchscreen now instead of a physical button, but it still works the same way and I've never had any problem hitting it without looking.
By consoles do you mean terminals? Terminal.app uses ⌘⌥1–9 to switch windows and ⌘1–9 to switch tabs. The F-keys aren't used by Terminal.app at all (well, they're sent to the terminal as an escape sequence).
No, I mean complete GUI heads: completely separate GUI login sessions which use the same screen and can be switched between. Also called 'virtual framebuffers,' I think.
Very awesome. I'm sure that Macs support something similar.
macOS has something called Fast User Switching, which is completely separate login sessions, but you access it through a menu on the right side of the menubar, not with keys.
macOS also has Spaces, which is just virtual desktops, but again, it doesn't use the F-keys to switch between them.
I'm strongly reading GP comments as trolling, given indirect context, but I respect your approach of taking the high road by assuming simple ignorance.
I really wasn't trolling. I've not used macOS for almost twenty years now, so I genuinely didn't know if it supported multiple graphics consoles. I'm not surprised that it does, but I wouldn't have been terribly surprised if it didn't, either.
My (un-trolling) point still stands, though: I use the Function keys on a daily basis, to switch between consoles.
We have many staff with MBP + dual external displays and it's always been the least reliable aspect of the platform. From reading between the lines in the unusually arcane history of support docs on the topic, I've surmised their stance can be summed up as "it might work!" Which of course runs counter to the Apple It Just Works ideal, so they can never come out and admit as such. They've gone to great lengths to squeeze impressive performance out of their stingy graphics hardware choices at the OS level, but there's not much you can do to massage the numbers when adding up pixels, I guess.
For what it's worth (anecdote incoming) I use a touchbar MBP with a Dell UP2414Q, which is driven using multi-stream transport. Effectively its panel is presented to the system as two separate displayport streams running daisy-chained over a single port. Once I found the right cable, everything worked fine. (The first cable was advertised with DP1.2 and MST support, but it would only operate in the legacy mode that dropped down to 30 Hz).
God forbid you try to use this with Windows though. Sometimes half of the screen cuts out, sometimes one side of it shifts by a couple hundred pixels (and wraps the right edge of the image around to a stripe down the middle of the screen), and god knows what other problems that I can't even remember. This was with a GTX 900 series GPU which is definitely "supported."
I used to have it hooked up to my Windows desktop since that's the fast computer with more storage and RAM, so it should be great for stuff like Lightroom. But since the screen doesn't work reliably, I moved that back to my MBP.
A friend with the same screen had identical issues on Windows and a similar solution. It's now on his wife's desk for her to plug her Macbook into.
Display signaling has gotten a lot more complicated than DVI/VGA were, and the reliability problems that have cropped up from that are present across the industry.
I can't say for sure if it's the cable's fault or if it's the particular combination of cable/computer/screen that has some obscure compatibility problem. Makes me miss the days when a cable was a cable and we could tell people "Just buy any HDMI cable, no need to spend $60 on it."
I use my MBP with 4 different external monitors (all different types, Apple, Samsung, Acer and Dell), two at a time, and it almost always works. Once in a blue moon something glitchy happens, not sure if that's reasonable performance or extraordinary performance given I haven't seen any other platform do as well.
This was one of the reasons I never adopted Linux on a laptop. Power management simply never worked. I used Windows for many years on a ThinkPad with Linux in a VM but this felt dirty. Bought a Mac and life was good. Well it was until 10.13. 50% of wake up events I have to log in to a trashed desktop now.
It makes me long for a computer nailed to a bit of ethernet that is never turned off.
Edit: also I just went through hell trying to get a USB to serial converter working on OSX. Not exactly a crap one, a Keysight U1173B with Prolific chipset.
Are you connecting to an external monitor? Sleep Wake still works fine for me. The other thing is that I didn't import anything from backup. It's a clean install.
In my experience there have been problems for a while with sleep/wake if you have external monitors. I'm running 10.12 (work computer, no option for 10.13 yet), and I have three monitors connected to my MBP. I had to adopt a ritual about disconnecting the first screen, then lifting the lid a bit to activate the internal display, then disconnect the other two monitors, then close the lid. Otherwise more often than not when I woke my computer up next it would not have a usable desktop -- the dock would be on a nonexistent screen and could not be found. I got pretty used to using spotlight to load terminal and blind type 'sudo reboot'.
That's similar to my experience when using HDMI cables. Switched to using USB C -> MiniDP cables and things are better now, except since I can't daisy-chain the two monitors with DisplayPort (the rMBP can't drive them both, a Thinkpad happily would) that means two out of the four USB C ports are used up.
Still getting random freezes sleeping and waking though. Especially if I don't open the internal panel before disconnecting the external monitors and USB hub before putting the laptop to sleep.
Linux specifically has a horrible track record for sleep/battery management in laptops, and worse recovery. Windows used to be far more buggy, but the long XP era a lot of that was fixed by XP SP3.
Aside:
I just wish there was an option in Mac to use "PC Shortcuts" in all my apps... it's the only place where some of the key combinations feel truly alien in most apps. I use a "PC" keyboard, but remap CMD to CTRL, ALT to SUPER/WIN, and CTRL to ALT... but in the end, terminal is awkward, and some other shortcuts are hard.
May take the time to figure out how to get VSCode how I like it with the windows/linux shortcuts, but my key bindings.. find/replace are particularly awkward to remember, and usually resort to mouse menus.
Not just a horrible track record, but the current state is also bad. I have a pretty recent Debian install on a bog standard Lenovo which otherwise runs Linux beautifully. It took days of fiddling with conf files and trying things out to get Suspend and Hibernation to work in a sensible way. The kernel, systemd and Gnome all try to do stuff, but they can't seem to agree on who's responsible for what part of power management. This is something that should work out of the box.
I installed Arch on a T460p, and suspend-to-RAM worked out of the box. (And this has been my experience w/ Thinkpads and Linux for well over a decade now. Now, I don't do suspend-to-disk, because I dislike it.)
Yes I've been struggling with the latest Mint, 50% of the time on wakeup I just get a black screen and no responsiveness. I've had dual-screensaver issues, incoorect monitors etc. Really makes it feel hackish.
I have a similar problem running my touchbar Macbook Pro in clamshell mode via a CalDigit USB-C dock. All sorts of issues with it discovering USB devices when you plug the hub in too.
Sleep / wake in this kind of setup has always been an issue with my 2013 rmbp. I'm not even on high Sierra. USB stuff doesn't wake up the computer. Opening the lid doesn't wake it up. Sometimes typing on the laptop itself doesn't work and it requires a hard reboot. It's been four years now and I've given up hope that Apple will ever get sleep / wake right.
The reality is that Apple's software is absolute shit. OS X was the only software that wasn't shit. I can't think of a single counterexample otherwise. They take great software (like logic audio) and turn it to shit. It's incredible. Clearly macos follows in the shit tradition of iTunes, the legendary mother of Apple's shit software.
Very similar issues here. MBP Touchbar with one external 5K LG display. I love the LG when it works.
Super frustrating when I I sit down and wake up the machine to find both displays flashing. Usually unplugging the LG clears things up, but replugging often results in the brightness on one display being set randomly.
Clamshell mode has notoriously been a problem for many years over a bunch of models. Sleep/wake has usually been way better than Windows or Linux, but has also had it's share of problems. The sleep/wake issues usually get fixed, the clamshell issues from what I've gathered get resolved less often.
I've just bought my first MacBook Pro with a dedicated GPU this year, and I'm having WAY more tiny glitches than with the pure Intel machines I'd had before. (10.13 has thankfully fixed lots of them!) I love my 5K screen, but I hope I'll never have to buy a machine with GPU switching again.
I'm really surprised Apple is still releasing MacBook Pros with gpu switching after all these years. They've always had serious problems and I figure they would stop selling them or make the major changes needed to resolve the issue.
Thankfully, I haven't owned one, but I hear so much. Which sucks, because there are more and more nvidia-specific things I'd like to do on a mac laptop.
I have an OG MBP with the same problem. It's seems to have improved, but I still occasionally get kernel panics (?) when I resume with multiple monitors connected.
