MacDirectory Magazine

Photography Edition

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

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the USB-C cable and plug it back in again. This, of course, rather defeats the point of having a KVM; it should work perfectly every time, like my previous setup did, but with a single press of the button. Once I plug the USB-C cable back in, it works fine for the rest of the day. Once it starts working, the AV Access iDock C10 KVM switch is great. As I often switch back and forth to read an email or change my music playlist, this KVM from AV Access really does make switching painless and fast, much better than my old setup. Speaking of music, I discovered a very odd behavior of this KVM: It toggles audio and video on and off. If I am listening to music using Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music on the first computer, then switch to the second computer and back, it will stop the music on the first computer. If I switch back and forth again, it will restart the music. If I am playing a video on YouTube or Netflix in a browser, it will do the same thing, stopping and starting the video. What on earth!? This is super bizarre behavior. I messaged AV Access’ support about this; while they were quick to reply, they could not provide an explanation or a resolution to this problem. With some experimentation, I was finally able to figure what it’s doing. Whenever the KVM switches to the other computer, it’s doing whatever the digital equivalent is to hitting the space bar. What do I mean by hitting the space bar? For example • Hitting the space will toggle music and videos on and off. • Hitting the space bar will scroll down one page in a browser. • Hitting the space bar will add a space wherever the cursor is in a document. The KVM does all of these things, and it does them reliably, every single time I switch from one machine to another. This is a crazy bug, and it’s horrible. As someone who does a lot of writing and software development, I can’t have a KVM that injects spaces into everything. I don’t know why it does this, but AV Access needs to fix this ASAP. Until they do, I had not choice but to unplug the KVM and go back to my old setup. There are a few other details worth mentioning: • The KVM can supply power via the USB-C cable to the laptop, so I don’t need to use the power brick that comes with the MacBook Pro. That’s a handy touch. • The KVM is often warm to the touch, but it’s never been hot. • My Samsung monitor has a picture-by-picture (PBP) feature; when using the KVM, I cannot use this feature, as there is only one video input into the monitor.

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