I’m not aware of the contest or award in contention here, but this MacWorld article is so terribly written that it is frustrating to read, and in fact motivated me to write an equally poorly-written but mercifully much shorter post about it.
Now I do not wish to throw stones too hard, for obvious and typical reasons regarding the throwing of stones, as well as due to the fact that there actually is good information in this article, which I will shortly rely upon, at least in part, in making a purchase. But why is the information so hard to get?
This article seems to have been written three times, chopped up into paragraphs and, like the taped recording of a calliope in The Beatles’ Mr. Kite, simply thrown in the air and re-assembled in no particular order. But don’t take my word for it:
The article includes numerous reviews of items. With those, it’s nearly seven thousand words, and without the inline reviews, it’s still nearly three thousand. And for what? Repetitive and confusing out-of-order passages like this:
The macOS requires the user to permit “Screen Recording” in order for DisplayLink devices to work properly. This can be found in System Preferences under Privacy in Security & Privacy; navigate to Screen Recording in the list on the left, then tick the Screen Recording permission for DisplayLink Manager after unlocking the padlock using your admin password. You may need to quit and restart DisplayLink Manager afterward. Don’t worry, DisplayLink isn’t recording your screen—this just lets it do its magic enabling multiple screens.
Installation is straightforward. Older versions did not support laptops’ closed-display/Clamshell Mode, but 1.8.1 and later do support Clamshell Mode if the MacBook is Intel-based running macOS 12 or if the MacBook is M1-based running macOS 11 or later.
The scariest bit is when you need to enable “Screen Recording” to allow the DisplayLink Manager app to capture pixels and send them to your USB peripheral. This entails making some adjustments in the Mac’s “Privacy” tab, but you are walked through it step by step. Take a look at the instructions here.
— https://www.macworld.com/article/675869/how-to-connect-two-or-more-external-displays-to-apple-silicon-m1-macs.html
This is the bit that made me stop reading and start writing. The third paragraph is a partial restatement of the first, but which would have served well as a very early gazette of the more detailed instructions. The third paragraph should have been placed near the beginning othe article, with a note that it “will be covered in detail later.” As it is, that three-paragraph riddle is more than a thousand words into the article.
I’ve burined the lede here, as I suspect that this article is written or at least edited by AI, and this is the garbage future that we have to look forward to. The real peril is not articifial intelligence but actual stupidity. Unless the entire MacWorld staff has been slain and replaced by robots, this article passed review and was approved for publication less than a year ago (according to the date on the online version). Now perhaps it is a long-in-the-tooth pastiche of innumerable updates, but there’s a fix for that called a re-write. MacWorld is not somebody’s blog, but a grown-up tech magazine with real people who get paid to write and edit.
