Apple has quietly — and maybe only semi-effectively — lifted one of the MacBook Air’s most annoying limitations. With the new M3 MacBook Air, you can finally plug in two external displays at once… as long as you close the laptop’s lid.
While this is likely an acceptable trade-off to most, considering not many people use multi-monitor setups with more than two displays, it still feels like a strangely arbitrary limitation for a laptop running a chip as powerful as the M3 (especially since you can get around this limitation by following guides like this one from Macworld).
For context, the M3 Pro MacBook Pro works with two external monitors natively while the lid is open. The M3 Max chip can push four additional displays, plus its screen for a total of five displays. It’s worth noting that the M3 MacBook Pro only supports one external display with up to a 4K resolution at 60Hz despite featuring the same chip as the M3 MacBook Air.
It’s possible Apple could add similar dual monitor support to the MacBook Pro through an update.
