A user purchased a Mac Mini M2 Pro (2023) with 3 Apple Studio 27” 5K Displays. An Apple store happily sold him everything ensuring that it will “just work”. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Although the Mac Mini M2 Pro does support 3 displays, the Apple tech specs page says the following:

Up to three displays: Two displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz over HDMI.

This seemed acceptable to the user and he purchased an HDMI to Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C 4K cable to connect the third screen.

Sadly, Mac Mini was having none of it and was refusing to recognise the third screen when connected with HDMI – Thunderbolt cable. After further research, it appears these Apple Studio displays can only be connected to native Thunderbold video ports and will not accept anything else.

Since the user was insisting on 3 screens and native/supported Apple solutions, workarounds such as DisplayLink were out of the question. This left him with 2 choices:

• Return one of the Apple Studio Screens and purchase a third-party 4K screen with native HDMI support.
• Return Mac Mini Pro and purchase Mac Studio M1 Max / Ultra which supports up to 4 5K Thunderbolt displays.

February 2023
Mac Mini M2 Pro (2023)
Apple Studio 27” 5K