
Since I understood the concept, I went about installation fairly haphazardly, but it worked instantly out of the box. Download and run the main Luna Display app on your primary Mac.Plug the Luna Display USB-C dongle into your primary Mac.Download and run the Luna Secondary app on the secondary Mac.Make sure that your primary Mac and secondary Mac are on the same network.Refer to Julio’s and Allison’s articles for details about the Luna Display setup. That was sufficiently troubling that I switched back to my Thunderbolt Display as soon as I finished writing this article. I don’t know if I could live with them because Luna Display exacerbates a problem related to my particular 2020 27-inch iMac that causes multiple kernel panics per day. To make a long story short, Luna Display does turn my older 27-inch iMac into a secondary 5K Retina display for my 2020 27-inch iMac-with that wonderfully crisp Retina text-but it comes with quite a few tradeoffs. Alison Sheridan of Podfeet recently wrote about Luna Display in detail, finding that it works well for her setup, and after talking to her about it, I summoned the energy to move my 27-inch Thunderbolt Display to the floor and replace it with one of my extra 2014 27-inch iMacs. Most notably, starting with version 5.1, Luna Display has seemingly achieved the holy grail of dongle-based display- support of the 27-inch iMac at full 5K Retina resolution. Since Astropad’s initial release of the Mac-to-Mac mode, the company has radically improved Luna Display. Though not yet fully baked, especially on the DisplayPort end, Luna hardware and its related software are a godsend for those with extra Macs ready to be repurposed as second displays. When we first covered the product in “ AstroHQ’s Luna Display Dongle Turns a Mac into a Second Display” (20 November 2019), Julio Ojeda-Zapata concluded: But what if you could somehow connect the old Mac in such a way as to make it look like a display to a new Mac? That’s the concept behind Astropad’s $134.95 Luna Display.

#ASTROPAD NOTES UPGRADE#
The recent disappearance of the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display from Apple’s product line has thrown a spotlight on the core design tradeoff with an all-in-one Mac: you can’t separate the Mac from the monitor when it comes time to upgrade (see “ Which Mac Will Replace the 27-iMac for You?,” 12 March 2022). Luna Display Turns a 27-inch iMac into a 5K Display

#1626: AirTag replacement battery gotcha, Kindle Kids software flaws, iOS 12.5.6 security fix.
#ASTROPAD NOTES ARCHIVE#
#1627: iPhone 14 lineup, Apple Watch SE/Series 8/Ultra, new AirPods Pro, iOS 16 and watchOS 9 released, Steve Jobs Archive.#1628: iPhone 14 impressions, Dark Sky end-of-life, tales from Rogue Amoeba.
#ASTROPAD NOTES FOR FREE#
