 This little red pill contains everything you need to take an old or slow computer, in this case a MacBook Air, and breathe fresh life into it. And get this. It doesn't even have to plug into the MacBook Air. Daaaaaaa! Neat, right? And that's not all. It can also be used with an iPad with proper support for multi-touch. Ohhhhh, what? Look at this. I'm dragging icons around on a MacBook with my finger. None of this is new, strictly speaking, but it showed up on my radar because there's actually a PC compatible one coming. So we'll be using the Mac version to show you guys how it works, and see if it's all it's cracked up to be. Like our sponsor! Honey is a free online shopping tool that will find you the best promo codes on most shopping websites like Amazon, eBay, and more. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. Did I mention it's free? 🎵 At $130, the Luna display isn't exactly cheap. At least, not if you only intend to use it with an iPad. Sidecar comes with Mac OS as of Catalina, and just like Luna display, can use either Wi-Fi or USB connection to turn your iPad into a secondary display. In fact, Sidecar even offers things that Luna display doesn't, like the command sidebar and context-sensitive media control bar. So then, why spend that kind of money? Well, for starters, with Luna, you can actually use the touchscreen to interact with the desktop. Apple makes me so angry sometimes, because Sidecar does allow you to use touch, which would indicate to us that there's no technical reason why you couldn't do it. But it's just locked to only work with an Apple Pencil. Luna, meanwhile, does away with Apple's arbitrary restrictions and even enables the use of multi-touch gestures. So that means that you can much more easily take a connected session and roam around with it. Now, of course, Apple's ecosystem has answers to this too, with features like handoff letting you pick up where you left off in apps that support it. But the thing is, not every app does support it, and not every desktop app is available on the iPad anyway. But wait, there's more. While both Luna display and Sidecar support the Apple Pencil, Luna display tends to have smoother input, with quick strokes resolving smoothly more often, rather than snapping to angles like they tend to with Sidecar. This kind of makes sense, given that their other product, AstroPad, adds more art-focused features like custom pressure curves, strokes smoothing, and external keyboard shortcuts at the cost of being mirror-only. Now, in testing, performance between the two of them seems quite similar, and for good reason. Both of them are powered by the same engine called Liquid, which promises lower latency and higher frame rates than competing software. They're so focused on it, in fact, that they even included a handy vitals graph that lets you see the current bitrate and latency. By the way, make sure you take care of your vitals with our super comfy underwear from lttstore.com. Now, unfortunately, while their low latency claims might have been accurate before Apple Sherlocked them with Sidecar, when we fired up our LDAT latency tester, we found that Apple's implementation actually provided lower click-to-photon latency and better variance, both in wired and wireless modes. Oof. An interesting side note, though, both implementations have similar delays between wired and wireless, but while Sidecar reliably flashed the secondary screen every time we clicked, Luna Display sometimes dropped it, with checkerboarding showing up in some frames. So while Luna Display seems to handle input better than Sidecar does, Sidecar offers a more consistent experience overall. One thing we couldn't measure was the latency that's added by inputs on the iPad side due to the way that both Luna Display and Sidecar handle touch. But subjectively, input lag on the secondary display seems similar between the two, perhaps owing to the way the dongle works. Internally, this little puppy shows up as a USB billboard device, which contains the serial number, which is basically a way of saying that it's got functionality that is only exposed when it's connected to a compatible device. In this case, it seems to specifically want USB alternative mode before it'll open up any further. And on macOS, the dongle exposes an input device and a client device that presumably acts as the secondary display. So altogether, it seems like for the iPad, Sidecar is the more responsive and certainly less costly experience, while its implementation of touch leaves something to be desired. Now, as for using Macs as displays, this was actually my main interest in this product, since there's about to be a lot of Intel-based iMacs that will eventually be discarded for shiny Apple Silicon models. And, well, man, I don't know. It could be better. It can use Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or Thunderbolt. And guys, I've seen Thunderbolt latencies go as low as two milliseconds. But the thing is, whichever option you choose, it's gonna rely on CPU resources on the secondary machine. So depending on your Mac, it could work great, or it could be only useful for productivity and web browsing, like our MacBook Air here. Maybe we'll try it on the new iMacs when they get here, though. Get subscribed so you don't miss that. Also, while it will give an older machine a second lease on life, allowing it to be used as a secondary display, it won't do anything to resurrect a Borkin machine, since it's gonna have to be fully booted to macOS. To be clear, however, this is not a jab at linear display. And I actually appreciate that their product exists, because their imperfect solution, as imperfect as it might be, is the only way to do this at all right now. And the most frustrating thing about that is that Apple used to have this functionality built in. I've been complaining ever since the day they first removed target display mode. And guys, I am going to keep complaining till it's back, because it was great. You just plugged your old Mac into your new Mac, and bippity boppity, off you go. A full-quality connection for the cost of a cable, with no encode or decode nonsense, or anything like that. And it kept old Macs out of the trash. This decision, which Apple justified by upgrading to a 5K display for which no interface existed yet, was part of a slow slide into user unfriendly and environmentally unfriendly practices that actually culminated in Apple launching real lawsuits against private repair companies who wanted to prevent old, but otherwise usable, gadgets from effectively being loaded up in the proverbial woodchipper. Apple's official stance is that AirPlay, and now Sidecar, I guess, has taken the place of target display mode, but the truth is that you can't officially use AirPlay to use another Mac's display. That is reserved solely for Apple TV or AirPlay compatible devices, because... No, there actually is no because. We have interfaces that can do 5K60 now, so it's because f*** you, go buy a monitor. Whoa, hang on, guys. This video was literally already uploaded on Floatplane in early access, when Apple announced a feature that basically Sherlocked Luna Display even harder, called AirPlay to Mac. Yeah, that thing we just said didn't exist. But there's still something to our argument. AirPlay to Mac requires macOS Monoray, while Luna Display will officially run on any Mac that can run El Capitan, so that includes iMacs as old as 2007 for secondary displays, or 2011 for the primary Mac. Monoray, meanwhile, requires a 2016 MacBook Pro or 2015 iMac at minimum, and according to Apple, Macs older than 2018 may run at a lower resolution. That's a lot of old computers that are missing out on AirPlay to Mac, or that will end up getting a worse experience. As for Luna Display, they are soon launching the version for Windows that's actually up for pre-order now, and while Windows does have a similar feature built in, it's an optional one if you guys weren't aware, it is far laggier than Luna Display is, at least on the Mac, so if all goes well, maybe we can at least keep some PC all-in-ones, most of which also don't have a way to continue to use their monitors after the computer's usable life has expired, away from the electronics recyclers for at least a little while. At least long enough to hear about our sponsor. Thanks to CleanMyMacX for sponsoring today's video. CleanMyMacX is the all-in-one cleaning and optimization software for your Mac. It's got a simple and easy to use interface that allows you to find outdated junk files and see what's taking up your valuable storage space. You can also stay up to date on what apps you have installed and what permissions they have, so you always know who has access to your webcam and microphone. Use Smart Scan to find and get rid of old cache files, and while you're optimizing your computer, you can also check for and remove malware to keep you safe. It natively supports the new Apple M1 Macs for a smoother experience, so why wait? Check out CleanMyMacX today and download a free trial by using the link in the video description. Thanks for watching, guys. For more subjective, but not subjective, graphic stuff, maybe go check out our video on RTX. Is it a total waste of money? I'll see you over there.