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
Trouble in Promise-land
What's the first thing you do when you've got a display that has tons of interfaces and bandwidth at its disposal? Try them all at once to see if anything breaks of course. Over the course of the past few days that's exactly what I did. Unfortunately I did find a situation where things broke.
For whatever reason, if you're doing a lot of writes to the Promise Pegasus while playing music (or any other constant audio) through the Thunderbolt Display's internal speakers the audio will eventually corrupt. You can hear exactly what I'm talking about below:
TB Pegasus Audio Issue by AnandTech
This is a recording taken of me listening to music on the Thunderbolt Display (via its internal speakers) while writing a couple hundred gigabytes to the Pegasus R6. Note the introduction of what can only be described as really bad noise at the 6 second marker.
If you stop music playback and quickly resume, the problem will still be there. You have to restart the application that's using the audio codec to recover from this point. From a hardware standpoint, the codec just needs to go through an off/on (sleep/wake?) cycle to return back to normal. If you do this however and haven't stopped the transfer, the problem will creep up again. Stopping the transfer while playing back music won't fix the issue either. You have to stop the transfer and restart the music playback application for it to go away.
The issue goes deeper than that. I went out and bought a Creative Labs X-Fi Go Pro USB sound card to see if the problem stopped at the internal audio codec or extended to all USB sound devices. Unfortunately, it does even happen if you're using an external USB sound card connected to the Thunderbolt Display. Connect the same sound card directly to your Mac or use your Mac's 1/8" stereo jack and the problem goes away.
I was worried that what may appear as noise through speakers could result in data corruption over USB transfers. I ran the Pegasus write test while copying a bunch of files to an SSD attached via USB to the Thunderbolt Display and never saw any corruption on the SSD. This appears to be limited entirely to audio playback.
What's truly bizarre is I can only get the issue to appear when writing to the Pegasus, hundreds of GBs of sequential reads don't seem to produce it. Short bursts of writes don't seem to cause it either. Sending tons of data across the monitor's Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800 and USB ports doesn't seem to trigger it either. It appears to be an issue with the Pegasus and the Thunderbolt Display. But which device is ultimately at fault? Is it a problem with the Thunderbolt Display or the Pegasus? Ideally I'd use another Thunderbolt storage device to see if the issue remained, but I couldn't get my hands on a LaCie Little Big Disk.
I thought of something else.
First I needed to test and see if perhaps the issue was related to ultra high speed transfers. As we've already shown, the Pegasus can push as much as 1GB/s over Thunderbolt whereas none of the other bandwidth eaters come even remotely close to that. To determine if the issue was data rate invariant I wrote to the Pegasus at different speeds ranging from 480Mbps all the way up to 7.2Gbps. I tried putting SSDs in the Pegasus as well as standard mechanical hard drives. The problem remained. I got audio corruption regardless of what drives were in the Pegasus or what speed I wrote to the drives. The problem wasn't related to transfer rates.
I also took apart the Thunderbolt Display to confirm there weren't any obvious issues on the controller board (E.g. putting the Thunderbolt IC far too close to the audio controller). Nothing obvious there either.
While I was doing all of this, Apple put forth a Thunderbolt firmware update the other day, however it didn't seem to address the issue either. So I went back to my testing.
Since the problem appeared regardless of how fast (or slow) I was transferring and all I needed was another Thunderbolt storage device to vindicate either the Pegasus or the Thunderbolt Display I turned to the trusty MacBook Air.
As I mentioned in our original Pegasus review, if you have two Thunderbolt equipped Macs and a Thunderbolt cable you can actually put one of the machines in target disk mode and access its drives via Thunderbolt on the remaining Mac. You don't get super high performance but you can get around 500Mbps. Since I had reproduced the audio corruption issue at an even slower data rate I decided to give this a try.
I booted the MacBook Air in target disk mode by holding down the 't' key after turning on the machine. My MacBook Pro was connected to the Apple Thunderbolt Display and a Thunderbolt cable connected the display to the MacBook Air. This was the same setup as the Pegasus, but with the MBA in place of the Pegasus.
I wrote to the MBA just like I did the Pegasus (from a file server connected over the Thunderbolt Display's GigE, transfer rates were capped at around 500Mbps from the file server). After a couple hundred gigabytes were transferred without any audio corruption I swapped out the MBA and connected the Pegasus. I copied the same files at the same rate from the same source. After no more than 7GBs were written to the Pegasus the audio stream started to corrupt.
Based on my testing I can only conclude that the Pegasus seems to be at fault here, not the Thunderbolt Display. Given that the Pegasus was introduced prior to Apple's Thunderbolt Display it's not all that surprising that this issue made it through to production. It's unclear what the root cause is but it's hopefully something Promise can address either through firmware or a driver revision.
Update: I'm still verifying that this is indeed a "fix" but it looks like if you use a USB sound card plugged into a USB hub which is then plugged into the Thunderbolt Display then the sound corruption doesn't happen. This seems to point at noisy power as being the cause with the USB hub acting as a crude filter. It's still not ideal but this may be a workaround for Pegasus users until Promise supplies a fix.
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dsumanik - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link
Lemme guess, you have a macbook?My original post was not to tear down the display so much as to point out the blatant bias in the review.
Sorry man, its blatant.
Also
You have taken my qoutes as literals instead of sarcasm..obviously people with more than 2 brain cells would stack the display on some books instead of buying a height adjustable desk.
C'mon dude!
I kept bringing that up because anand used that as a way to offset the obvious shortcoming due to his bias toward this and apple products in general.....its a laughable excuse that was even mentioned!!
He could have said :
"The screen has no adjustable height, why did the engineers miss this one? You are going to have to stack your 1000 dollar display on some books in some instances, ruining the design goal of less clutter and a clean workspace that apple had intended to achieve"
He instead implied it was no biggie cuz you can get a height adjustable desk and chair...
LOL
There is no reason the display couldnt have adjustable height, NONE.
In your opinion..this would be "impossible" ok fine, you go with that.
In my opinion:
Someone in management thought the display would look cooler without it, and they could save some production costs while charigng the same pricetag.
The bias was too much for me in this review, it distracted me from the actual product review...its all i could hear after awhile...there is a reason for that.
Not because the display sucks or doesnt suck.
There was a whole combined 60 seconds spent of the shortcomings of this diplay followed by a 14 minute praise apple and heres a blowjob for being so awesome commercial.
I think the display is nice, thunderbolt is an interesting technology that could provide some awesome tech in the future......
BUT
I just dont see why this display was recommended as "a must have item"
It was a commercial, plain and simple, because anand loves apple products and this is in his opinion one of the more interesting ones to come out this year.
my original summary still stands with some corrections
-no sound OUTPUT (sorry!)
-no usb 3
-incompatible with anything but 2011 MACS (right now)
-1000 dollars (i could buy 5 TN 1920x1080 displays for same price)
-you need to buy an adjustable desk and chair (joke!)
I didnt list firewire as a pro because since the conception of this technology i have not ever used a device requiring it, nor has anyone else ive ever known. Yes I am sure poeple out there in internet land might need it somewhere.
But do you think it would it be awesome if they included an ISA slot too????
LOL
I guarantee you and every single person you know could make use of a USB 3.0 port far more often.
the resoultion is nice, but doesnt justity 1000 bucks.... Built-in speakers, microphone and HD webcam....no problem you can find a 200 monitor with that too.
Also your macbook likely has all these things already!!!!
LOL
Go buy the display youve already made up your mind, this review sealed the deal for you...stop wasting your time and get down to the apple store....HURRY...there might be people camped out to buy one....run quickly!!! They are all gonna be sold and youll be left without this must have item for 2011!!!
BWAHAHAHA
repoman27 - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
Lemme guess, you have an American car?I'm pretty sure Anand realized that the engineers didn't "miss" the adjustable height or swivel options. They've opted not to offer these features for some time now on both the iMac and the Apple Cinema Displays, so it's nothing new. There are plenty of sound engineering reasons why they have chosen their current design. A single solid piece of aluminum looks cool, costs less, and is way less prone to failure than something more complex. The latter reason being a lot more of an issue with a 23 pound, $999, glass clad panel than with your cheap plastic 1920x1080 TN garbage.
I'm guessing you don't have many friends if you've never known anyone who uses FireWire. Almost everyone I know who has a Mac uses it, even if just for the occasional FireWire Target Disk Mode transfer. I use FireWire external enclosures because I do a lot of disk imaging and I value my time. I also know a lot of audio professionals who have quite a bit of FireWire audio gear. Yeah, I get it. If it's not useful to you, it has no value.
USB 3.0 hasn't even been shipping for 2 years yet. In it's first year it had an attach rate in the PC market of 3.5%. The projections for 2011 peg it at 18%. So even though far more PC's will ship with 1394 interfaces this year than USB 3.0, you still believe USB 3.0 is vastly more useful. Have you bothered to notice that there isn't a hell of a lot of device silicon available yet, so the only USB 3.0 enabled devices currently on the market are external drives and enclosures, bulky flash memory sticks, hubs, and a couple of memory card readers? That's it man. Not to mention that the drivers are also far from polished at this point.
You object to the bias in this review, yet you have clearly demonstrated that you have zero ability to objectively gauge the quality or inherent value of anything.
dsumanik - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
Actually i own a an american truck and a japanese motorcycle.ford ranger
yamaha R1
I also own an iphone4, and previously a 3gs... if youd like me to facetime you ill gladly prove it.
Im not anti apple...or anandtech...the reiview was mother effing biased.. That was my point and i think you've heard it. I wouldnt have posted my initial comments otherwise....you think im imagining this all in my head????
And im sorry but usb3 is backwards compatible...you can use it with anything from the last 10 years, 3.5% market penetration??? When was the last time you saw a PC or notebook or macbook ship without USB support?
How you gonna install lion on your mac without USB? Doesnt apple ship it's OS on a thumbdrive??? Guarantee it would install faster on USB 3!
That says it all.
If FW was so great why didnt they ship it on a FW flash drive?
Have you ever even heard of a firewire flash drive??? I think there was like some kangaru branded ones or something but they were super expensive.
Also, with ssd's saturating the sata 3 Gbps bus already...why waste time using USB or firewire to disk image? Firewire never took off, never will, and has been succeeded by esata, USB3 and now thunderbolt..Whether you like it or not.
But hey you can go on pretending like its not a dead interface.
Also, some food for thought....why are you trying to change my mind about this???? I'm not going to magically "see the light of day" and agree that this monitor is the best thing since sliced cheese
Im at peace with your reasoning..faulted in my view...but its no skin off my back...and your mind is made up....so go buy the monitor...
Apple and anand have spoken and this is a must have item!!!
You need to get down to the mac store like now instead of arguing with an idiot like me...the lineup is already huge and there are campers everywhere...buy it now before its too late!!
p.s.
Dont forget to grab a height adjustable desk!!!!
repoman27 - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link
I never mentioned my feelings about this display one way or the other. I also made no attempt to change your mind in regards to whether the ATD was desirable. I joined the argument because you made several inaccurate or irrational statements.I also never disagreed with you about the article being biased. However, objectivity and impartiality are not the same thing. If the data presented is verifiable and accurate, whether or not Anand arrives at the same conclusions as you should be somewhat immaterial.
I will keep bombarding you with reality regarding I/O interfaces though...
First of all, the attach rates I included were quoted from data presented by the USB-IF and, as I clearly stated, were for USB 3.0, not all revisions.
USB is very useful, more than 3 billion USB devices will ship this year. However, only 84 million of those will be USB 3.0 devices, all of them will still function with USB 2.0 or 1.1 interfaces, and not a single one currently offers any functionality that is unable to be duplicated by other interfaces.
There are far more than 84 million FireWire devices in the wild that have functionality that simply cannot be achieved using USB of any revision. It's a different architecture with a different set of capabilities.
eSATA is not a general purpose I/O, it can only be used for mass storage devices.
USB and FireWire are very complementary and exist side-by-side. Every Mac or PC to ever ship with 1394 also has USB. If you can't use USB in a given situation due to it's limitations, you pay for the device with the FireWire controller in it. I imagine that in time Thunderbolt will supplant FireWire and sit alongside USB 3.0. Once again, if you need a device that isn't possible using USB 3.0, pony up for a device with a Thunderbolt controller.
dsumanik - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
psssst....above top secret classified news bulletin:
Firewire's dead bro and the review was biased!
Constructor - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
Nonsense. FireWire isn't "dead". There are quite a few interfaces which have no alternative to using FireWire for several reasons, notably latencies among them.Thunderbolt is now the first possible alternative which can actually replace FireWire in every case (the sole exception: devices can potentially draw even more power from FireWire than even from Thunderbolt).
As to "bias" in the article: The article primarily demonstrated what the tested device can actually do in practice and how the technology behind it works, complete with numerical measurements.
All that with clear qualifications on which kinds of use cases it will support and which ones it won't.
If you think that only thoroughly negative reports on a tested device could be "unbiased" (or maybe just when we're talking about Apple's products, specifically?), then you probably have a very distorted view on such matters yourself and little understaning what "unbiased" even means.
repoman27 - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
psssst... If you weren't just trolling you'd realize that I never disagreed with you about the review being biased.1.4 billion FireWire devices shipped... more than 200 million in 2011... Continued strong support from Apple... Yeah, death rattle, bro. 86 FireWire.
AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
repoman27, dsumanik is absolutely right. If you spend $1000 on a monitor, it had better have height adjustment!Think of it this way; that's 4x a normal display cost. So if you buy a 4x cost car ($60k), it had damn well better have steering wheel height adjustment.
FW flash drive, LOL. I didn't even know those existed.
Apple didn't add proper monitor adjustments because they put style over functionality. And that's why they will always be at a disadvantage even beyond the price premium.
As for me, I've been enjoying my monitor for about the last 5 years...it's 3" more diagonal, it has 1600 vertical pixels, full height and swivel movement, and SD/CF card readers! How about that...look how much we've advanced in 5 years.
btw I don't get Anand's comment "These aren't just ports, they are backed by controllers physically located within the display" - is he saying they're not just fake ports and they actually work?
dsumanik - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
amen brotha,those ports arent just ports...they have controllers to back them up...
so watch out...
if you dont give this display the height adjustable desk it deserves...
The TB display will download your gigabit ethernet into the HD webcam and facetime your arse into a FW drive!!
(but only at USB 2.0 speeds!)
AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
Apple should have the height adjustable desk as an accessory.And advertise on their site "we have controllers to back up our ports".