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Interesting product that allows the Target Display feature to be re-instated for later Retina iMacs.
I have a MBP 14” 2021 M1Pro machine running Monterey 12.6 which has excellent performance and a brilliant display however when doing dev coding I find the smaller display a bit limiting with a lot of window swapping/shifting. Normally I would do dev on the big 27” screen iMac but it is an Intel machine running High Sierra 10.13.6 and lately the web technologies are starting to follow the support cycles of the OS eg: Node will only support MacOS current and two releases prior. The conundrum I had was that the iMac could be upgraded but I then got caught with the Intel/ARM Silicon transition along with the 32/64bit nonsense and the fact that Apple also removed the Target Display mode on the later iMacs.
An interim solution has appeared that I think will get me over the immediate transition issues.
The official secondary display approach (Apple preferred) for the MBP 14” would be to use a 27” Studio Display however whilst being a nice piece of hardware the price is high for a home hobbyist. The life of the 27” Intel iMac will be limited as I think Apple is keen to say goodbye to Intel support but the screen is too good to waste.
I tried Luna Display and it appears to work well – basically it is a dongle and software apps that allow the 27” iMac to be used as a secondary screen on the MBP 14”. My use case is desktop app dev using web technologies so the main requirement for the extra screen is more space for windows – I can’t comment on window performance for folk who are into video and other intensive stuff.
There are a number of different scenarios but mine basically is using the MBP 14” with the original screen and the 27” iMac as a secondary screen on the left and using Retina (most folk would use a clamshell arrangement with the 27” as the main monitor). The two machines are connected with an Anker TB4 cable (USB-C) and the USB-C dongle plugs into the MBP 14” so this leaves 1 USB-C TB4 port free on the MBP. Using the free TB4 port I connect to a Kensington SD5700T Thunderbolt & Dual 4K Dock unit which allows TB/USB storage drives to be connected to the MBP as well as providing an SDHC slot and iPhone charging ports. The SDHC slot in the MBP is used for a 1TB flush fit micro SD card in mobile mode.
The Kensington dock also provides charging power for the MBP so using the iMac secondary display does not impact the battery capacity.
This arrangement means I can use the MBP on Monterey with the 27” 5K Retina iMac screen and if I need to use the iMac I can just hold the ESC key on the iMac and the Luna Secondary Display app will close leaving me with the original High Sierra desktop – so important to note the secondary display machine is still a working machine (it needs to run the Luna Secondary app) it just doesn’t need to be the latest M1 silicon running Catalina or later.
Added bonus is not having to take a mortgage out for a Studio Display.
Also means I can keep running High Sierra for a bit longer (along with Lightroom 6.14) and my Dev can transition to Monterey. It is interesting how capable High Sierra still is given that it has been unsupported for a while. I find that the application Handover feature works on some stuff (eg: Safari on Monterey will handover OK).
After a hiatus of half a year of not using the Luna setup I found that the TB4 peer to peer connectivity no longer worked but ethernet was OK. I suspect it may have had something to do with the Monterey version being updated to 12.6.8 rather than 12.2/3 so looked at updating the Luna apps.
Basically took a bit of messing about to get it going but the Luna app on the MBP was updated to 5.3.2 as was the Luna Secondary client on the iMac running 10.13.6. Both machines were then shutdown and restarted. On the iMac I needed to go to ~/Library/Application Support/astropad/LunaSecondary/ and remove any files with state_sync in the file name. The TB4 cables were connected and once running the Luna app on the MBP was started (Mac to Mac connection set to TB only) and then the Secondary app on the iMac was started. A bit of display flashing ensued then it all worked.

Advanced settings in TB Network Bridge –
Uses Self-assigned IP With DHCP on Class B network
Bridge Status:
Without Dock -
   Thunderbolt 1 Inactive (Luna Red dongle) (next to Power port)
   Thunderbolt 2 Active (MBP – iMac) Maxonar TB4 1.2m cable
   Thunderbolt 3 Free for other device use
With Dock -
   Thunderbolt 1 Inactive (Luna Red dongle) (next to Power port)
   Thunderbolt 2 Active (MBP – Kensington Dock) Anker TB4 0.8m cable
   Thunderbolt Dock (KensingtonDock – iMac) Maxonar TB4 1.2m cable
Note: using the dock for the iMac linking cable saves a TB port on the MBP for further use.
The Luna splashscreen on the MBP will indicate Thunderbolt is being used.
The only issue currently seen is the SSD on the Kensington Dock being ‘ejected incorrectly’ which I think is down to the MBP going to sleep. The sleep feature has been disabled in the Battery Preferences (Energy Settings moved to Battery in Monterey) and the Disk sleeping function is also disabled – we will see how it goes!
Interesting to note that on the MBP the iMac will still appear in the Finder Network Devices so the network Storage Disks for the iMac are still available to the MBP so not really any need to have storage on the Kensington Dock.
Overall impression:
Appears to work well with TB4 but setup uses at least two of the TB ports on the MBP. It would be nice if the Luna app could avoid the need for a dongle that uses a TB port.
The rodents/keyboards and touchpads on both machines will function OK and the network storage on the display iMac is available to the MBP.

Cut/Paste works across both machines and screenshotting of the secondary display can be done with CMD-Shift-4 keys.

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The SD slot has been re-introduced so a handy way to add bulk storage. It is possible to get some flush fitting cards from Transcend (JetDrive Lite) upto 1TB however they are rather pricey and slow (95MB/s read - 75 MB/s write). A good alternative is to use a BaseQi MicroSD adapter (iSDA 303A) which fits in the slot perfectly and will accommodate a large MicroSD. The adapter is made for the MacBook Pro Retina 13” model and although Amazon, etc say it will not fit the new 14” M1 models AliExpress suggests it does and indeed that is the case. It is snug not too tight and no problem to put in/out(protrudes c. 0.5mm). Unfortunately for the fashionistas it is aluminium and the M1 is Space Grey but for me that is not a showstopper.
In my case I used a SanDisk Extreme 1TB MicroSDXC UHS-1 (160MB/s read - 90MB/s write) and so far all works OK.
Card was inserted and formatted as exFAT using Disk Utilty Erase function (the card was already exFAT but I wanted to format it in the host machine anyway. The slot is apparently capable of UHS-2 support but there are not many of those cards around and they are expensive anyway.
Update:
There is now an iSDA 420A UHS-II adapter available in Space Grey.

Update: A few months later and the MicroSD was ejected improperly for some reason and could not be mounted thereafter (don't know why) - however I managed to isolate the problem down to a sub-directory c. five levels deep that was showing zero bytes size even though there was 1.2M of folders inside. On another machine the card eventually mounted after about an hour of trying and it was possible to open the folder and copy out the content. I was then able to kill the faulty folder and replace it with the new copy so something must have corrupted the size data of the folder.
The folder name was 'lexers' - was that a bit close to Lexar for Sandisks liking? Odd!

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Apple has now decided to use port 5000 for the AirPlay Receiver in Control Center so any dev projects for Mac that use port 5000 will get this error message. The AirPlay receiver can be disabled but it is now probably easier to just avoid using port 5000 for dev servers.

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Recently obtained a Series 7 watch to keep an eye on the ol’ ticker and it can be handy for other things too – like altitude/alarms/compass/phone calls/etc. Crucially for me it works with my old 5 SE phone which is great because I don’t want to upgrade to a bigger phone just yet.

For the avoidance of doubt there was indeed a 5 SE ( I saw a forum comment that there was no such thing) – it is based on the 5 Series body (with 4” screen) and fitted largely with the internal componentry of the 6 Series which were the latest at the time. The 2nd edition of the SE was issued later (with a 4.7” screen) and now a 3rd one has been introduced (still with 4.7” screen).

Anyway all that is required for the 5SE to work is to upgrade the IOS to version 15 and away you go.

The 5SE is the oldest phone that will work with the Series 7 watch.

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iMac was running 10.11 (El Capitan) with 1TB spinning rust hard drive formatted as HFS+ (Journaled). Machine performance was sluggish (8G ram) so did disk clone then in place upgrade.
In place upgrade to 10.14 (Mojave) was done successfully and this process updated the HD formatting to APFS. It appeared to ‘wrap’ the existing HFS+ volume with the APFS container.
The performance was still sluggish so rather than go with a clean install of Mojave it was decided to go to 12.1 (Monterey).

Prior to the upgrade I cleaned up the machine and did a Disk First Aid from Disk Utiliity and all was OK.

Tried an in place upgrade twice but got an error –

Storage system verify or repair failed. : (-69716)

so HD remained on Mojave.

Decided to just reformat the HD as APFS and do clean install from flash drive which worked OK.

In hindsight I think the error probably was caused by the fact that the old HFS+ format was in the APFS container and I don’t think the later Mac OS’s play well with HFS+.

Certainly is a challenging time in the Mac world with the three transitions – HFS to APFS/32 to 64bit/Intel to ARM.

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Normally hooking up a printer is not a lot of hassle but this one was a grim struggle – pretty hopeless for a company that has been doing printers for a good number of years now. Anyway, on with the saga –

Unboxing and setting up the hardware takes a wee while but is relatively straightforward. Lots of protective tape and ink tanks easy to load from the bottles (they go glug/glug/glug until the max. level is reached then obediently cease). Each bottle will have an amount of ink left that equates to the amount used during the initial setup conditioning cycle and once this cycle has been completed the tanks can be topped up.

The hassle starts with the software setup. This model is not classified as a business machine so there is no ethernet port and the options are USB and WiFi/Direct WiFi. Using the USB is OK but Apple do not supply drivers for the ET-2710 (unlike a lot of older Epson models) so the driver needs to be installed from the Epson website. Once the driver is installed then Bonjour will pick up the printer over the ethernet and System Settings can be updated appropriately.

The WiFi is not so easy – certainly from the Mac perspective the software install process seems to assume the use of WPS on the hub/router which I really didn’t want to use. This is a showstopper since any resolution of issues invariably referred the user back to the website and the usual software install which of course wants WPS!

Fortunately an article on the net provided an answer which basically is to connect an IOS device using the Direct WiFi.

https://mattjameschampion.com/2021/01/31/epson-et-2711-et-2710-se ries-printer-wireless-setup-made-easy/

When this is done then a printout of the Network Settings can be obtained which will show the SSID, IP and password of the Direct WiFi connection. Using a browser to the IP will bring up a setup utility which will allow the Wifi to be setup without using WPS ( note: when connected via Direct WiFi over wireless make sure you don’t have an ethernet plugged into the same device as this confuses the TCP/IP and the utility page will not be found).

Using WPS is to be recommended as the install appears to require it.

Using IOS devices for printing is not straightforward since the printer does not support AirPrint however support may be provided via third-party apps on the AppStore. I tried the Epson iPrint app which will print photos and such but when I tried to print from Mail I just got a message saying no AirPrint printers found.

My use case is for a network/desktoppy printer so it is OK but for higher use with IOS devices I would suggest getting a printer that is AirPrint capable from the start. Photo prints appear very good and the text is sharp enough.
The AirPrint apps on the AppStore may work OK but a lot seem to be ‘in-app purchases’ which I find to be a bit opaque.

I have obtained the Printer Pro app by Readdle and it works quite well although not quite as seamless as AirPrint would be eg: printing text of email requires the text to be copied to the clipboard and PrinterPro will then be able to print with the usual setup options.

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Well – very impressed with DosDude’s macOS patcher. I used the Mojave Patcher on my mid-2009 MBP and it works well. The only issue that seems to occur is the machine doesn’t fully down power on a restart and just hangs with the mouse cursor showing. This also happened occasionally when it was running Yosemite so I can’t entirely blame the patcher. I took the lazy route and did an upgrade rather than a clean install but it’s OK.

I chose to remain with HPFS rather than APFS so automatic software updates will not occur however the machine is running the last major version of Mojave so should be OK.

MBP 5,3 (mid-2009) – 8GB RAM, 480GB SSD, HPFS

Yosemite 10.10.5 → Mojave 10.14.6 (started as Snow Leopard years ago).

Procedure: (fairly much as outlined by DosDude)

1 16GB USB 3.0 stick
2 Download Mojave from target MBP using Mojave Patcher Tool. (Last major version – 10.14.6)
3 Format/Erase USB stick using Disk Utility
4 Create patched installer on USB stick using the Mojave Patcher Tool (took c. 10mins or so)
5 Shutdown then start with option key held down then select USB installer choosing SSD as target for install
6 Install the macOS (suggested 29mins but took c. 50mins)
7 Re-power with option key then select USB installer and select the macOS Post Install (I used the defaults for 5,3 model)
8 Reboot into the new install – Patcher detected some new updates so installed them.

The MBP 5,3 model I have fortunately had a supported wireless card firmware but there is now a patch to fix the unsupported ones as there is for the iSight camera which previously stood a chance of not working but is as good as gold now.

The System Updates in Mojave allowed the updating of a couple of apps as well as the bundled Apple ones (Garageband, etc). A Safari update came through later and appeared to work. I think the limitation on Software Updates if not running APFS applies only to the major version updates maybe.

Just needed to cull a few wee unsupported apps and the printing/networking appears OK.
AirDrop between Macs is OK – iOS devices won’t work on hardware that predates 2012.

In theory Mojave should see this MBP out but there is always the option of moving up to Catalina should I wish to try the absolute 64bit only environment. Big Sur will be a big step too far for this old machine I think and 10 ~ 14 years for a laptop will be pretty darn good! Apple don’t lose since the cash goes towards the iMac anyway.

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Was always annoying how .webp file icons (Google standard) would show as blank and were unsupported in Preview however it seems that support has been enabled (at least partially) without much fanfare in the latest updates to High Sierra (2020-004 security update along with Safari update). The icons now show a wee preview of the file and QuickLook will view the file however if Preview is opened there will be no window shown.

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Don’t often use FTP but recently encountered a message – ‘Server Busy – Waiting to Upload’ when I connected to my webhost.
The connection would happen quickly and the remote folder list would appear then if I dragged a file from the local to the remote I got the message. Nothing would happen for c. 10-15mins then the connection would timeout and immediately I would get a file overwrite dialog and after OK the file would upload OK. It took a while but I found that the default prefs are set for Multiple Connections (5). I had set it to 2 hoping that it would help but found that it only started working when Multiple Connections was unchecked.
The FTP had been working before but now I think the servers are insisting on 1 connection at a time (this still allows multiple upload of files by the way but over one connection).

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This happened in the morning when switching on the iMac.
Boot up was quite slow then finished up with an Installation Log of a failed MacOS Installer.
Looked very bad but the fix was to shutdown then Restart whilst holding down the Option key which then shows the bootable volumes. In this case the boot volume was pointing to MacOS Installer rather than the Macintosh HD so I changed it to the Macintosh HD volume and the iMac started OK.

This appeared to be a result of doing the Software Update the previous day (2019-001 10.13.6) which required a restart. I had left the update to happen and when I came back c. 1hr later the screen was black so I plugged in the mouse to the USB to juice it up and immediately the display started again. It looked like the update had worked OK but in the morning however the signs were very different.

Once the correct volume had booted OK I checked the updates and they showed that the iTunes and Safari updates had happened but the security update was still showing UPDATE on the button (the security update is the part that needs the restart which will happen 1 min later unless clicked prior).

At this point I did a whole lot of backing up of data and then restarted the iMac again - sure enough I got the Installation log and the boot volume was set to MacOS Installer.

I then booted into Macintosh HD using the Option key method and redid the Security Update - it proceeded to download c. 1.81GB and then did the install (c. 15 mins or so). The install appeared normal and ended with the logon screen. The Macintosh HD boot now seems to be OK.

Not sure why the MacOS Installer was involved because there is no installer in the Applications folder (I removed the downloaded Mojave copy to avoid inadvertent upgrading action). Also when I applied the Security Update I had all my data volumes (ext USB/TB) disconnected to avoid any tragedies.

Machine is -
iMac 27 2017 4.2GHz i7 40G RAM running 10.13.6 (High Sierra)