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Hands on
By Mike Wuerthele
On Wednesday, October 10, 2018 at 10:13 am, Eastern Time (1:13 pm ET)
Several combinations of applications use Wi-Fi to extend the Mac desktop to the iPad for some time, but the new Luna Display plug of the Astropad application manufacturers eliminates the hacks of the equation and allows to send fully accelerated videos from the software. Mac to an iPad companion app.
The Luna Display dongle is a USB-C or Mini DisplayPort device that plugs into a compatible Mac port to route information to a dedicated, free iPad application. Essentially, Luna turns an iPad into a wireless touch screen for Mac.
AppleInsider has been using a Luna Display prototype for a year, and now the full version for a month while producing content. We also used gestures, pinches and the full range of gestures on the Apple Magic Trackpad – and again, no problem.
Compared to the standard edition of Astropad that does not require a plug, the Luna Display dongle facilitates video much faster, since it is now accelerated by the GPU 's. computer. Even in the personal Wi-Fi networks of small offices and individuals, we had no problem. It was interrupted a few times with a quick motion when tested in a busy Starbucks, but the video signal quickly corrected itself.
Make no mistake, there are still delays due mainly to the latency of the Wi-Fi connection. This is not much and it's better than most extension applications. 39, wireless screen. But you can see it and it is clearly tangible. We are not sure if we want to play games, but productivity and e-mail do not suffer at all.
We have looked at different display extension applications for iPad and MacOS and previously wired implementations, but Luna Display continues to impress.
The company claims that the app runs on the iPads up to the iPad 2. We can confirm that this is the case, but we can not recommend the use of a screen older than an iPad Air. The new sixth generation iPad, released in the spring of 2018, or an iPad Pro, as we have the habit, works perfectly.
If you have a relatively new iPad and a MacBook Pro and you're on screen, AppleInsider recommend Luna display. We are less optimistic about hardware requiring an additional $ 29 payment for Astropad to unleash the full potential of the Apple pen in conjunction with the Mac, as the hardware costs $ 80 alone for a USB-C version or with the Mini DisplayPort connector.
But even without that, it opens up unique use cases, especially with headless devices, like connecting to a headless mini Mac running as a home server or to a MacBook Pro from another room in your house .
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