Tried this for hours: won’t really work with Luna DisplayPort on 2014 MacMini and iPad Pro. Also, does not support the keyboard on the iPad. Their support was very slow and disappointing, quoting only what’s already on the website. Luckily got the device for a few quod on eb*y.
I'm really sorry to hear you had a poor experience with Luna Display. We do support both the iPad keyboard and Mini DisplayPort so I'd be happy to try to get this figured out for you.
You can contact me directly matt@astropad.com and we'll get thing sorted!
Also for Windows users, we have Luna Display for Windows coming later this year! Sign up to our waitlist if you're interested: https://astropad.com/windows
Seems like you're facing some tough choices. You have a few choices:
1) Accept the company is going to shrink, and do so cleanly. Engineer the product to be maintainable by a small team. Acquihire away some of your engineers (although that's tough in the COVID19 job market). Etc.
2) Find a way to pursue major growth. This almost certainly requires you to do major pivots and take on major risks.
3) Do nothing, and watch the company go from black into the red. Have successive rounds of demoralizing layoffs, and watch the software bitrot into obscurity.
You can:
1) Continue to provide the existing product under the existing pricing model, with a much smaller market. You'll have less revenue, and less means to improve the product; you'll basically wait for Sidecar 2.0 to eliminate that vestigial market.
2) Continue with the product at a lower price point. I'd never buy your product for $80 / year, but I'd definitely do it for $5/year. I have an older iPad 2 I could repurpose as an additional monitor, or better yet, a digitizer tablet.
3) Go sleazeball and maximize short-term revenue: mine your user's private data, false advertising, the works.
4) Pivot into a changed world, and introduce something to add a lot of additional value. That requires vision, aggressive engineering, etc. Most such pivots fail, but some do work.
By far the biggest risk is to do nothing. That's a choice in itself.
Personally, if I were in your shoes, I'd think through remote work and remote teaching right now, and see how to best support that. That's the growth model. iPads have digitizers, spare cameras, etc. all of which can be awesome for this sort of work. So do many other devices. Cross-marketing can be huge here too (cheap software, expensive hardware up-sells, or expensive integrations). You can often make more money as part of a solution in an ecosystem than as a solution.
I'm happy to report that we haven't had to lay anyone off and we don't plan on it!
We found that there is still a market for our products, Luna Display[0] and Astropad[1]. Apple's Sidecar has limited features and doesn't support older devices.
For the past year, we've been rewriting our code base in Rust and we are nearing completion (you can read about why we chose Rust[2]) Our codebase previously was Objective-C/C and this kept us tied to the Mac platform.
Now with a solid Rust core we will be bringing both Astropad and Luna Display to the Windows ecosystem, a market that is 10x bigger! We are launching for Windows later this year and if you're interested I encourage you to get on our wait list: https://astropad.com/windows/
We also have a slew of new remote work products in development (we've been a remote team since 2013), but I'm not ready to share details yet ;)
I'm actually interested in using an iPad as an occasional display for a Linux box (with hardware dongle for better performance). Any plans to support this? Is it already possible and I just haven't heard of it?
i think it is relatable that the people who are looking to use a computer without needing an additional screen would also like to not need another keyboard (or not want to bother with switching/re-connecting)
if i understand it correctly sidecar supports using the keyboard attached to the iPad (but not the mouse)
I have to concur with the other comments. I got a Luna USB-C key right before Apple announced sidecar and back then I was pretty bummed I spent the money on something I would not have any use for anymore once Catalina would be out. Turns out sidecar doesn't nearly work as well as Luna Display. Sidecar loses on all things that matter: image quality, user friendliness, responsiveness, stability. The only thing it wins on is price, hard to compete with free.
I recently found another use case for my Luna display by the way, when I wanted to play some real-money online poker in the garden (shelter in place makes you want to do things like that ;-). Apple does not allow gambling applications on iOS, and screen sharing Pokerstars on my Mac Mini using VNC was a really shitty experience. So what I do now is start the Luna app on the Mac Mini, connect the iPad to it, then take it out into the garden (which has its own wifi AP) and put it on full screen. Responsiveness and touch control are excellent that way.
Hardly. Apple has a strange definition of what 'cross-platform' means and still sucks at making their technologies available on non-Apple platforms and AstroPad realised this so the answer is obvious [0]
And the answer to being 'sherlocked' is by going cross-platform. Astro also owns their own hardware and is not limited in software so they can support Windows, Android or even in some cases Linux platforms, not just macOS.
In this case, SideCar is enabled on newer Macs (Catalina) and iOS 13, requiring people with unsupported Macs or iPads to upgrade their hardware to these requirements [0] which is unnecessary for this feature when AstroPad supports older Macs, Apple Pencil and iPads on the minimum requirements. [1]
So, yes. Hardly sherlocked, unlike several software only companies who get completely sherlocked in all areas every WWDC.
"Sherlocked" refers to the platform owner (Apple) cloning an app (Astropad, Duet Display, Air Display et al.) or its prime function (using an iPad as a secondary display) into the OS (macOS.)
Since Air Display was not part of macOS and was not created by Apple, we could probably say that Air Display (like Duet and Astropad) was Sherlocked by Apple/Sidecar.
That being said, it's a pretty obvious feature that I've wanted since the first iPad. I started using Air Display when it first came out, but it always felt clunky and I wanted a simple wired solution that was included in the box and "just worked."
Yeah. I'm rooting for astropad (or duet display, or anyone else) to be the multi-platform solution people will pay for. Akin to how some of us pay for password managers instead of browser-centric solutions.
I'm still waiting to see how ipadOS evolves, but I'd would consider using using such a setup with a mac and a surface go.
Side car is good and works really well, but still has a long way to go to be as game changing as it really could be. Adding touch support on the iPad second screen for one. And then supporting macOS devices as a sidecar screen - use an iMac as an external screen for a laptop, or for an iPad Pro.
I don't see this happening soon, as macOS screen interaction is largely optimized for precise pointing (mouse, trackpad, Apple pencil) and less for gestures/multitouch (though some are supported on the trackpad) and Apple seems reluctant to change that. But you never know.
Personally I'm extremely happy with Sidecar and being able to use an iPad/pencil as a smaller Cintiq.
In my experience, SideCar provides a very poor experience. (I’ve never tried their product, but at the moment I’m writing on an iPad Pro and I’m VNCing into my Mac using Edovia Inc’s Screens, which is an excellent iOS/iPadOS VNC client).
Sidecar was horrible for me, but then I had some issues reinstalling my virus/firewall software (required for $WORK). For the brief window when the third party firewall wasn’t active, everything actually worked great. I don’t know about you, but all the issues I had were completely unrelated to Sidecar and instead related to an overly zealous firewall config. Now that the firewall has been “fixed”, it’s back to not working for me, but for that hour or so, it was actually quite nice.
(That’s ignoring the new weekly crashes that the virus/firewall scanner now causes... which is another story).
SideCar (using the enabler trick) between a Mac mini (Late 2012) and an iPad Pro 10.5 was very laggy over USB. It wouldn't work over wireless. I'd rather try an app instead.
I've been trying the built-in screen sharing VNC, and that too is very laggy.
The Mac mini has tested fast (iperf3.. latency and bandwidth are good) over WiFi, so I think an app has the potential to be fast.
It's solving a problem I currently have but am using VNC to solve. Are there differentiations vs screen sharing in that way. Appreciate that it could be usability and market positioning to mean that I'm not the target audience, but is there some other functionality I've not seen in the demo video? And yes my Mac Mini is currently headless with no display (using the paperclip hack to improve performance) or keyboard.
I'm using Display Menu on the headless Mac Mini that holds my ripped CDs and DVDs. Seems to work great with Screen Sharing from my other Macs.
I've been very happy with how it works. I've gone from a 2007 to a 2012 to a 2018 Mac Mini using it. There are times, almost only when I'm upgrading to the new computer, that I have to break out the physical connector and use an external display.
If you have two displays you could use something like Synergy to accomplish what you want. I use it both at work and at home. I work for two companies under the same owner, and I do all my IT related support work on one PC and my other duties on the other. I have two screens side by side, and one keyboard/mouse connected to the machine I use the most. It's set up as the KM server under Synergy. I just drag my pointer to the right edge of my left display and it seamlessly transitions to controlling the computer hooked up to the right display.
At home I have a Slackware workstation, a Windows gaming machine, and a Mac mini, each with a dedicated display. Again, I can drag my mouse pointer to the left or right edge to access either of the screens/PCs left or right of my main display.
There is an open source fork called Barrier as well.
I'm not using VNC to Mac Mini enough for me to give meaningful feedback on typing lag. I'm currently mostly running it headless media server and local web server, so occasional remote. However with children requiring access to more devices for longer I'm looking at ways to solve shorter term need without having to go out and buy new hardware.
You can just buy a dongle online that does this. It’s an HDMI dongle that tells the OS that you have a monitor plugged in when you don’t. There is a way to make the adapter yourself (paperclip hack), but using an actual adapter has the advantage is it can support higher resolutions that you can then export over VNC.
Seems like if it’s not loading the driver then it should be possible to just load it with kextload? No? I can’t imagine that it’s not a module if it gets activated later, but obviously I could be wrong. I’m not a MacOS kernel hacker.
I guess that would be easy to check by running kextstat before and after plugging in the DisplayPort.
Sadly I only have a 2013 Mac Pro (which has AMD graphics only) so it will operate differently. :/
Paperclip hack is the resistor hack that others in the reply have linked to. My paperclip has been in situ for a few years so don't have the original source, but one of the resistor hack how to postings suggested that there was enough resistance in a paperclip and had a spare display adapter kicking around so tried it and it worked for me. Laggy performance on headless Mini ended.
I have a panel set up with the appropriate adapters. I originally got the Adafruit kit, which came with a nice frame. That board worked for a while, but I would not recommend it for two reasons: something changed/broke after a year and a high power AC adapter had to be used with it, and it's much more expensive than the other boards out there.
My recommendation for these are the converter boards from AbuseMark [0]. In addition to the basic DP-eDP adapters, he also has HDMI and miniDP versions of the boards. Powering the boards for the backlight is also easier as it's just USB. It seems that he's introduced a USB-C version recently as well. He also has a number of very useful "accessories", like different cables for the various kinds of LCD panels, or a specialized DP-HDMI adapter that handles the odd resolution properly. It looks like shipping from Japan is on hold for the time being, but I highly recommend them once shipping is back up.
Thanks for your input! Those from AbuseMark look great. The USB-C version works if DisplayPort Alternate Mode is supported. It costs 30 USD, same as regular DisplayPort one.
I have an AbuseMark board as well, despite not having used it yet as I don't have the right display connector the service was excellent and can vouch for them too. I had a cheap chinese board first which didn't support brightness control, but the AbuseMark boards support brightness control over serial so that's nice.
The Apple requirement to have a keyboard + mouse plugged in even if you're doing remote desktop or using a remote display is really frustrating. It seems like a few releases ago you could fix it with an app, but now you're stuck. Even worse on the laptops where it seems like a monitor is required too...
I wonder if this app manages to get around that somewhat through trickery?
I have a mac mini I use as a media server. It has no keyboard, mouse, or display. I VNC into it from my iPad or use Screen Sharing from my Macbook Air just fine, although I have reached for a keyboard once to solve a problem.
But I do not doubt you are describing a real problem. Can you tell me under what circumstances using a remote desktop requires a mouse and keyboard to be physically plugged in?
Not so much mouse and keyboard, but display. For at least a while (not sure if it's still the case) graphics acceleration would be disabled if there wasn't a display, leading to things like [0] and [1]
this was fixed in software a while ago, even my old 2011 (?) Mac mini no longer needed the dummy hdmi dongle connected to have aresponsive/hw accelerated UI via remote access
On laptops you need to have a mouse keyboard and a screen connected if you want to be able to keep it turned on in clamshell mode. Can't say about desktops.
An interesting way to achieve this that I've recently discovered is that I can use Apple's built-in Screen Sharing application to act as the keyboard, mouse, and display when connecting to a clamshell MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro then only needs to be connected to power and the network.
Can you elaborate on the topic of battery degradation? isn't this a scenario that the iPad was built for? how would it be different from hours of watching videos?
I've found that it's fine as long as you have your laptop plugged in. Before COVID I worded every day on a Macbook Pro 16 with an iPad Pro w/ Luna as my second display. Everything stayed at full charge.
I'll also mention that for whatever reason Luna works far better than Duet. I always get black bars and lag on Duet, but Luna is generally flawless (except for the occasional crash or random switch from wired->wireless connection).
If Macs and iPads are able to bypass the battery entirely and power the hardware directly through the charger, then it shouldn't have an effect on the battery. But it's also possible that it's just charging the battery while also using which will shorten the battery life, especially as you don't allow it to do full power cycles.
To add to jmull's point, in this day and age there are very few things and iPad 2 is the best tool for the job.
Panic's dashboard was one of these things, Luna Display would be another.
From the other side of the spectrum, if the Mac Mini is not a primary computer, sticking it in some closet and using a VNC/Luna Display/Duet like combination to use it from a modern iPad is pretty efficient. The rest of the time you just keep using your iPad for any other intents or purpose.
I have two old iPads laying around, one is used strictly as a random web browser / guest device. The other is a mini that is sometimes useful for ebooks when traveling.
I also have a headless mini, so... For me it’s a cheap solution as it recycles older hardware.
If you have already brought a mac mini and an ipad an extra $50 isn't that much - though this should of course be something Apple should have thought about.
I was waiting for a clarification on the poster's meaning of "oomph". Usually we use that term to mean something about "goes faster" or "does more" or "pulls harder".
Comparing the SoCs of the RPi4 to the iPad Pro, the Pro's A12Z has 8 cores vs the 4 of the Pi's Cortex-A72, more L1 cache, way more L2 cache, 8 GPU cores on chip (vs the Pi's separate GPU (which has at most 4 cores)), etc. etc.
The only meaning of "oomph" which I could imagine that would put the Pi ahead of the iPad would be in flexibility in terms of what can be done with the device.
> The only meaning of "oomph" which I could imagine that would put the Pi ahead of the iPad would be in flexibility in terms of what can be done with the device.
That's exactly the point.
A RPi is currently much more flexible than an iPad for some workflows that need a terminal or desktop software. For this use case, the iPad acts as a self-contained power supply, internet connection and thin client.
However the iPad's own capabilities are recently improving with the new features of iPadOS.
Sidecar only allows for the iPad to be the second or auxiliary display - making it effectively useless for this purpose.
I'm actually gonna implement this setup (I'm looking out for used Mac minis on my local equivalent to eBay this week), for when my iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard get delivered over the next couple weeks.
This means I'll be able to use the setup for sketching and illustration, video-editing, note-taking and other typical iPad tasks, but then also be able to hook it up to the headless Mac mini (which I plan to stash in a cupboard) and use Xcode and other MacOS-only applications.
No idea how well this is gonna work, but I'm certainly looking forward to illustrating again - something I've barely done for the last few years, and which used to be a large and very satisfying part of my work (in the days before narrow specialization was such a thing).
> Sidecar only allows for the iPad to be the second or auxiliary display - making it effectively useless for this purpose.
I had noticed that, and that's why I was wondering if an HDMI dummy (a simple device that pretends to be an HDMI display) could be the primary display, using sidecar so an iPad would be the secondary display, mirroring the primary.
I did a bit of research a couple of months ago when I wanted to set up Sidecar for illustration (but couldn't because my Macbook is slightly too old); it seems that, whether with Sidecar or other paid Apps, the iPad as a drawing tablet may not be ideal if you need fine control.
Just thought I'd note that in case this setup is very important to you before you buy your Mac Mini. I don't do any sort of graphics design and video editing, but people seem to be generally pretty happy with it for those purposes.
Also, many of the free drawing Apps in the App Store are actually very full-featured and feel fantastic to draw with (please support them if you like them), which is what I settled on in the end. The only thing that I miss about my Wacom Intuos is the textured surface.
Edit: removed repeated "a couple of months ago" and "in case", moved things around a little.
Sorry for being unclear: I’m intending to use the iPad for drawing with Procreate. At least as far as all the commercial illustrators that I personally know (which is quite a few) this is now their standard production setup.
For video I’m gonna try the iOS application LumaFusion - this is new to me, so I have no idea how it compares to apps like Final Cut Pro or Premiere, that I’ve used in the past - but I’ve seen some encouraging YouTube videos showing editors using it, at what seems to me blinding speed.
The Mac mini would only be used for Xcode and other stuff that isn’t available on iOS (or iPadOS).
As a goal, sure there are cheaper and more powerful alternatives.
But if you have a mac mini sitting around, and you also have an iPad, it's an innovative way to reuse the hardware you've got for only $50 -- especially if you're space- or cash-constrained.
It's not an Apple thing, this conversation - it's about devices suited for different (but overlapping) purposes, and how to handle when you reach the intended suitability boundary for the device you're on.
For much of what a tablet is intended for, a mouse makes no sense (or rather, touch makes most sense). But for operating a desktop GUI which was designed for a mouse, then obviously a mouse is at an advantage.
Recommendation: Do not buy.