I have the VGA and HDMI adapters for my Macbook Pro 2011, but can only connect one display at a time – neither adapter has a female Thunderbolt connector to act as a passthrough.
My understanding is that I can use two Apple Thunderbolt displays by daisy chaining them and have three displays – the native notebook display, and two Thunderbolt displays – at once.
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Is there a way to connect two non-Thunderbolt displays to the laptop, via a splitter, or some sort of Thunderbolt cable or adapter?
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If I buy one Thunderbolt display, can I then use the VGA or HDMI Thunderbolt adapter daisy-chained off that display to drive a non-Thunderbolt display and have three monitors that way?
Best Answer
The Apple mini-DisplayPort to VGA or HDMI adapter terminates the Thunderbolt chain where it is connected, so until Apple released new MacBook Pro with two Thunderbolt ports (similar to the iMac that has two ports) then you will only get one video signal from the device through the Thunderbolt port.
You may find an inexpensive USB to VGA solution to get around this limitation. Initially they were slower, but the newer ones are getting much faster and the software much better. You can then put the most important content on the Thunderbolt port and have the secondary display served over USB.
Should a Thunderbolt adapter come about that drives two displays, I'll update the answer, but nothing has been released (or even rumored) even though it's clearly something the protocol could support.
I like this knowledge base article for the clear deprecation of which Macs support two Thunderbolt displays and which ones only support one.