The Apple Thunderbolt Display Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 23, 2011 2:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Displays
- Mac
- Apple
- Thunderbolt
- Thunderbolt Display
Final Words
As a display, the Thunderbolt Display is no different than the 27-inch LED Cinema Display. You lose some of the resolution of the older 30-inch panels but you get a much more compact form factor that feels far less overwhelming on a desk. Having the 27-inch display exclusively for the past year I can honestly say that I don't miss the 30. I've mentioned before that I'm more productive on a single high resolution display vs. two lower resolution panels, the 27 continues to suit my needs very well in that regard.
Quality hasn't changed at all since the previous generation. Color temperatures are finally more reasonable out of the box thanks to Apple's pre-calibration on all panels. Brightness and contrast are both good and calibrated color quality is professional grade. Color gamut is about the only blemish, a side effect of Apple's LED backlight. If you're coming from a notebook panel however, you won't notice the difference.
The real improvements here are obviously those enabled by Thunderbolt. Apple is turning its line of displays into docks for its mobile computers rather than just external displays. It started with integrating MagSafe and has culminated in GigE and FireWire controllers now a part of the display. For MacBook Air owners who don't have options for these high speed interfaces to begin with, the Thunderbolt Display is a must-have. If your MBA is a secondary or tertiary computer that only gets taken on trips perhaps the Thunderbolt Display isn't so life changing. For those users who have moved from older MacBook Pros to the 13-inch MBA however, the Thunderbolt Display is a wonderful companion.
For MacBook Pro owners the Thunderbolt Display is more of a convenience than anything else. If you ferry your notebook between locations frequently, having to hook up only two cables vs. several is nice. I don't know how else to word this without sounding incredibly lazy (I promise I'm not), but I'm more likely to move my notebook around if I don't have to unplug/reconnect 7 cables everytime I get back to my desk.
For me the Thunderbolt Display is good but not perfect. I wish it had a 1/8" stereo output, an SD card reader and USB 3.0 support. Give me those things and I'd be ecstatic. There's always next year's model.
Promise Pegasus owners beware. If you're writing to the Pegasus while listing to music via the Thunderbolt Display you'll eventually encounter dropped/corrupted audio frames. The problem seems confined to the Pegasus, so we'll have to wait on Promise for a fix. The Thunderbolt Display itself doesn't seem to be the cause of any issues.
Even with its limitations, the Thunderbolt Display is one of a kind. I do hope it's the start of a much larger trend. Short of a CPU and memory there's a bonafide motherboard inside the Thunderbolt Display, featuring many of the components we're used to seeing inside systems but now encased in a display. Thanks to SSDs, Turbo Boost and Thunderbolt the only thing holding notebooks back from being true desktop replacements is GPU performance. Sony has already toyed with the idea of sticking a GPU in an external box connected to their notebooks, perhaps that's something we may see more of in the future.
There are still significant concerns over the adoption of Thunderbolt in the future. While it may be free of royalties, there's only one company that makes Thunderbolt controllers: Intel. Not to mention the licensing fees for using the Thunderbolt logo. What made USB and PCIe successful was the ability for many companies to produce and integrate the necessary controllers. I believe we'll need to see the same from Thunderbolt for it to truly become ubiquitous.
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Boopop - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
OK, so my Dell 2408WFP isn't as big, but in most if not all the tests it outperforms this new monitor. If I was a graphic designer (which I'm not!), even if I had a MBA I reckon I'd stick with a higher quality monitor, and put up with the extra cables.On the other hand, if I was the average Joe Bloggs with a MBA, this makes a great monitor for that specific laptop. I like where Apple are going with this, it's just a shame about the lack of many USB ports, and the average screen quality.
IceDread - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Normally when you test a display you also test the input lag which I find very important. I could not find info about input lag in this review.tipoo - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Not really as important to the target demographic, I think. Most people who get these will be using them for professional tools, so things like colour accuracy are more important than reaction time. If someone is buying one of these and a mac to game on, they've made a pretty bad error, lol.jecs - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
You have the general idea right.For professionals not demanding the highest color accuracy for print or for broadcast production yes, the Apple monitor is a good choice. That is professionals who work on content creation like internet video, corporate videos or print material among others.
Serious print houses, photographers or broadcast professionals will choose high end specialized monitors in the range of $3000+, not in the sub $1000.
JasperJanssen - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
But they will generally only choose that type of monitor for *one* display, where the guy sits who does final colour correction on the output -- not for all the content creation people. (fair enough, if you're large enough that's multiple people, but it's never going to be the majority of your staff).Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
We normally test input lag by driving a CRT in parallel with the display being evaluated. I didn't have a good way of doing that with a Thunderbolt display unfortunately :-/Take care,
Anand
JasperJanssen - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
Well, keep it on the list for when the Mac pro comes out, which will hopefully have a videocard with multiple thunderbolt outputs :)Come to think of it -- new iMac with dual thunderbolt out and one of them through a VGA dongle? Hmno. Those are active dongles, which mess up results.
Two PCs, using NTP or something similar to sync up their internal clocks maximally, and one driving a VGA CRT with the other driving the thunderbolt display, each displaying very precisely the current system time in a large font, plus the usual fast shutter speed photography. Your accuracy would depend on the NTP-or-similar protocol. I wonder if you can get close enough with that, over a crossover Gigabit ethernet kept free of other traffic.
If you do get something like that running, you can also compare input lag between:
- Display port driving Displayport display
- Thunderbolt port driving Displayport display
- Thunderbolt port driving Thunderbolt display
-Thunderbolt port driving thunderbolt display switched through another TB device or display (add to the chain as possible)
And even whether displayport mac versus thunderbolt macs are different in this respect when running over the various dongles.
I would expect a Thunderbolt port running in Displayport mode to be very slightly slower than a real displayport, would be interesting to see if that is the case, and how it compares to a TB port in TB mode, and whether other devices on the chain affect it.
JasperJanssen - Saturday, September 24, 2011 - link
"NTP v4 with kernel mods to support it, is capable of much better than 1ms accuracy, possibly as good as 1ns. According to his article, NTP v3 is accurate to 1-2ms in a LAN and 10s of ms in WAN nets. "Well, since what you need is ms range, I guess this could actually work.
sheh - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
I was curious about that too. Regardless of who the target audience of the monitor is, it's a new technology so I'm curious about its performance vs. DP/DVI/VGA. But could be difficult to tell apart from the panel's logic own latency, at least until there are more TB displays.MrJim - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
The Youtube-video in this article, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtAgkIE42jc&fea... , is private. Hard to see then :)