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I was looking into buying dual monitors for my Mid 2012 non-Retina MacBook. I really liked the looks of the Dell UltraSharp 24 (U2414H)

According to Dell, the Monitor supports MST for the Display Port.

Does my MacBook support this multi streaming technology?

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4 Answers 4

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Unfortunately no, not at present (10.10.1).

Firstly, your MBP needs to support MST which is part of DisplayPort 1.2 - you can check your laptop's specifications as they may vary depending on which GPU option you went with when you purchased your MBP.

Secondly, even if your hardware supports it (many recent MBPs do) Apple hasn't added support to OS X for this feature yet. Users who want MST on MBPs have been using bootcamp to boot to Windows which supports MST on the same hardware just fine.

Update (10-08-2015): It would appear as though (thanks to the links of those below) that MST support has been added in 10.10.3. Yay!

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    I don't know if this answer was correct at the time of writing but this Apple support doc clearly states that if your Mac hardware supports MST then OS X should support MST as well. support.apple.com/en-us/HT202856
    – pseudosavant
    Commented Jun 7, 2015 at 15:55
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    MST != multi-monitor chaining. It's used by chaining, but also used for high-res on a single display using multiple streams.
    – sj26
    Commented Jul 23, 2015 at 5:23
  • would love some facts regarding the current situation. Does OS X now support chaining through DP 1.2?
    – Aron Rotteveel
    Commented Nov 30, 2016 at 13:17
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    Same.. do MDT hubs work? (StarTech MSTMDP123HD and MSTMDP123DP)
    – goofology
    Commented Dec 13, 2016 at 22:35
  • as of the 2020 (just got the new mac book pro), is there a way to have a daisy chain with the monitors? i only get them mirrorerd
    – EsseTi
    Commented Jul 20, 2020 at 14:16
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As of 10.10.3 Apple does apparently support MST* on certain hardware:

These Mac computers support multi-stream transport (MST) displays at 60 Hz:

  • MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) and later,
  • MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) and later,
  • Mac Pro (Late 2013),
  • iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014) and later

From: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206587

*Unfortunately it does appear to be limited to an MST display that relies on multiple streams like the 4K MST Displays mentioned further down on the Apple Support page, and not MST for chaining multiple DP1.2 Displays as I haven't been able to find any information about this being possible.

From my own testing with the new MacBook Pro 2016 13" with two thunderbolts ports, a StarTech DP 1.2 USB Type-C to DisplayPort cable, two Dell U2414H and a standard DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable to chain with, the display on the end of the chain just mirrors the other display. This is with DisplayPort 1.2 enabled in the settings on both displays.

Which seems to confirm that MST DisplayPort daisy chaining on OSX 10.12.2 on the 2016 MacBook Pro line is unsupported, with no sign of it getting supported anytime soon.

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    trying just now to daisy chain 2 monitors with no success on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015). I enabled 1.2 dp option for the monitors, but I still get a mirrored image.
    – Radu Simionescu
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 13:01
  • Yep, looks like Apple isn't interested in dealing with this in the near future, although it should be possible to support with a software/firmware update I think. A thunderbolt hub/splitter should do the job for now though.
    – Josh Doug
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 13:13
  • Hub/spliters won't work actually because they are based on the same daisy chain principle.
    – Radu Simionescu
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 13:25
  • They will, Apple explicitly supports daisy chaining with thunderbolt, not displayport though. So daisy chaining will only work with thunderbolt enabled monitors, but splitting with a hub will work for typical displayport monitors. You can drive two 2560x1440p monitors via a hub using a single thunderbolt port. I personally have two 1080p monitors connected via displayport to a StartTech Thunderbolt 2 hub. If you've got Thunderbolt 3 then you can drive 2 4K monitors over a single thunderbolt port with a hub.
    – Josh Doug
    Commented Aug 9, 2017 at 8:40
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    Disabled MST on the second monitor and it still mirrors
    – Eddie Monge Jr
    Commented Feb 9, 2018 at 21:11
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This doesn’t seem to be supported on the new 2017 MacBook Pro (A1708) with two Thunderbolt 3 ports.

However this is clearly not a hardware limitation since I am able to BootCamp into Windows where both external monitors work in extended mode (not mirrored). On the macOS Sierra side I can only have the two external displays mirror each other.

I have been using the IOGEAR GUD3C01 to test all of this.

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Not supported on 10.13.3 on 2018 (2017) 15" MBP using Kensington SD4600p dock.

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