Mac Studio multi display management: Rinse and repeat 10+ times a day

It shouldn’t be this hard. In fact, it should be “super easy; barely an inconvenience!” as the Quebecois says on YouTube. The module or whatever you want to call it, in macOS, detects the connected displays. In some cases, two or more of the displays are the same brand, model and year, because they were purchased at the same time. In my case just two Samsung LF32TU87. Not the cheapest, maybe one step or two above that. So operating systems that are decades old might have had a problem telling them apart, but any version of Windows from the past two decades can read the monitor’s EDID, basically metadata that tells the computer and the OS what’s the brand of the monitor, the size, model, resolutions, frequencies, etc, and specifically the one thing that the OS can use to tell them apart: the serial number. This is the same for pretty much every monitor out there nowadays.

So even if my two monitors are connected to the Thunderbolt 3 outputs of my Mac Studio, every day I have to do this process anywhere from 5 to 15 times, depending on how many times I sit at the computer and take a break to do something else, at which point I either leave the Mac on, which in 15 minutes starts the screen saver, and at 30 minutes or whatever time I set it to, it stops sending a signal to the screen so both monitors go into standby mode.

So you would think that when I come back to work and press any key to wake them up, my choice of main monitor will be the same. Well, not with the Mac Studio. Half the times I wake it up, the monitors are swapped. Imagine that you have your main monitor on the right, and the secondary one on the left. Now, imagine that someone came from behind the monitors, and put the one that was on the left on the right side, and the one that was on the right, on the left side. Then you have this problem where your apps that you had on the main monitor are now on the second one. 

So I have to open the new system settings app, go to the displays tab, click on the Arrange button, and on the window that pops up, I have to click and drag the screen on the left, to the right side of the other one, and after that, I have to right click on it, and select “Main Display”. This is a procedure I have to repeat almost every time I come back to the computer. Sometimes it’s even worse, because I may be using the second monitor for my PC or my work Macbook Pro, and when I wake up the Mac Studio, in which I left the right monitor as main display, now is not showing anything on that monitor, because when macOS is in the lock screen, and you wake it up, it only shows the GUI on the main monitor, not the rest. But since it changed the monitors, now the GUI is in the display where thunderbolt is not the current input. 

This has happened since I got the Mac Studio on June 3rd of this year, also under Monterey and with two Dell monitors I had before I bought the Samsungs.

I called Apple about a month ago, and I talked for about two hours to a super nice guy who asked me all kinds of details. He sent me an app from Apple that collects all the info about my system that goes to the Apple engineers to work on it. But the last time I checked on this with him, 9 days ago, still nothing.

So I just don’t get it because this is not some major rewrite of the macOS code, it should be as simple as a .plist file that saves monitor brand, model, and serial number, along with the other stuff like resolution, refresh rate, color profile, etc etc, and among all that, the variables for this particular thing, for example: 

Display 1

Brand = Samsung

Model = LF32TU87

SN = 6895-FRTEV9543 (no, this is not the actual serial number of my monitor)

Role = Main

Position XY = 0,0

Display 2

Brand = Samsung

Model = LF32TU87

SN = 9940-HDUTOP6458 (no, this is not the actual serial number of my other monitor)

Role = Secondary

Position XY = -3840,0

So all that macOS has to do is to check that plist file every time the machine is turned on, or the monitors waken up, or connected. Setting a display as main or secondary should only be done once, the first time you connect a specific display to the machine, or maybe if you booted a macOS installer from a USB drive, wipe the internal drive, and reinstall the same version of macOS or a newer version like I did with Ventura.

So why is it that some of the best hardware and software engineers in the world, who constantly produce the most amazing computers, can’t figure out the simplest of things? What am I missing here?

Because I can’t for the life of me think of an excuse for not fixing something so simple. As long as the monitor sends the OS the EDID data with a serial number, that’s all that's needed.

I don’t know what else to do. I just know I’m so fed up with having to do the same thing over and over every day because these people just don’t care or maybe I’m wrong and this is much more complicated than it seems. To me it’s just the guy on YouTube says: super easy, barely an inconvenience.