The IT Nerd

After I got my new monitor, my wife decided to claim my old monitor to add it to her desk setup. Her logic was that it both monitors were exactly the same and she could use a dual display setup as she was working from her MacBook Pro screen and an external monitor. To get some help with this, I reached out to OWC and they sent me this:

Meet the OWC USB-C Dual HDMI 4K Display Adapter. This will allow you to connect two HDMI displays to your Mac (or PC, Chromebook, Ubuntu box) as per this picture:

It supports resolutions of up to 4K 60Hz and it has a power pass through so that you can charge a laptop while having this plugged in as per this picture:

Extremely minor gripe. I would have loved to have seen an extra USB port so that I could plug in a device or a hub to truly get a one cable solution. But for those who run MacBook Air’s or other M1, M2 or M3 models (meaning not Pro or Max chips) that lack multiple display support, I seriously doubt that they would complain.

Here’s what I did to make this work:

1. Plug it into my wife’s MacBook Pro.
2. Plug in the monitors.
3. Plug in USB-C power.
4. Install the DisplayLink drivers as this is a DisplayLink product. Thus it will not work if the drivers are not installed.
5. Done. Declare victory and have a beer.

The product has worked flawlessly since then. I also don’t notice it getting hot or anything beyond it being mildly warm. However my wife has reported two “issues” to me since it was installed. I put the word “issues” in quotes because they’re side effects of sorts of the fact that this uses DisplayLink tech. The first was that she could no longer watch Netflix on her computer via Firefox. The reason why was that Netflix likely sees this adapter as some sort of way to circumvent whatever digital rights management Netflix uses as per this. The workaround of disabling graphics acceleration or hardware acceleration depending on what platform you’re on that was mentioned in the thread from the DisplayLink forum that I linked to does work to address this.

The second “issue” was this:

My wife was surprised by this and was questioning if the DisplayLink Software was recording what she was doing as she often works on highly sensitive files on her Mac. The answer is no it isn’t recording everything she’s doing. Here’s why directly from DisplayLink themselves:

macOS Catalina 10.15 requires the user to permit “Screen Recording” in order for DisplayLink devices to work properly. The message is generated by the OS and the screen is not actually being recorded by DisplayLink. Approving it enables the DisplayLink driver to access the pixels it needs to render a mirrored or extended screens, and send the pixels over USB from your computer to the DisplayLink display. It does not send any data or pixels back to DisplayLink.

The above is also true for later versions of macOS. And is likely due to the security built into macOS that warns you about anything and everything that it perceives as a threat (and rightly so). But here’s the TL:DR. Your screen isn’t being recorded. Period. Thus you can ignore this warning and return to your normal daily activities. And if you are wondering why I am taking DisplayLink’s word for it, the reason is simple. If their software were actually recording the screen, someone would have been able to prove that by now and DisplayLink would be in deep trouble. On top of that, DisplayLink’s tech is used by everyone from OWC, Dell, HP and Lenovo. Those companies wouldn’t want to be within 100 feet of DisplayLink if they were doing something shady. Thus I am confident that there’s truly nothing to see here.

Priced at $94.99 USD, this is a great solution for those with any M1, M2 or M3 Mac (meaning not Pro or Max chips) that doesn’t support multiple displays. I got it to work without any issue, and it’s stayed working. This this is another easy recommendation of an OWC product as it’s a must buy if you fit the use case of the product.

This entry was posted on December 4, 2024 at 9:00 am and is filed under Products with tags OWC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.