The Apple Thunderbolt Display Review

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• repoman27 - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link

  This is the first display to include ports that have their own host controllers. All other displays either offer just multiple video input ports, or have an internal USB hub and various USB devices that are connected to the USB host controller on a PC via a separate cable. Some also have an audio input as well for a connection to a separate audio output on the PC. So yes, whole different ball game here.
  
  I'd rather have a $120k car that doesn't have a stereo or floor mats because they weigh too much. ;-)
  
  I also like displays with height adjustment, but, and not to sound like a total Apple apologist here, Apple generally makes pretty good decisions about which features to include and which to leave out. Whenever you design an electronic gadget you have to make compromises. You can't cram every feature on the market into one device that's smaller and more beautiful than all the others and then sell it for an absurdly low price. The ATD is a pretty balanced package overall. Apple also doesn't have any currently shipping, proven, height-adjustable display stand designs at the moment. If they did, and simply omitted it for this product, it would be far more egregious.
  
  Yeah, stupid consumer HDTV market completely killing the mid-range display market.

• AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link

  The user doesn't care if there's a hub or host directly behind the USB port. It's a friggen USB port, just like my monitor has. And it'd be better if it were USB3, and if there were more than 3 ports. Plug in a mouse and keyboard, and you're quickly left with 1 remaining port, which isn't enough.
  
  You don't care to have a stereo in your car? Very odd. I'll take a 15k car with good sound over a silent 120k.
  
  Dell has had their swivel adjustments figured out for several monitor generations. Apple has no excuse, and makes poor feature decisions over and over. Like back when their iPod Shuffle came out, for $90 or whatever and no screen, compared to another brand that cost $35, OLED screen, superior battery life, and functions like a flash drive without iTunes. In addition, Apple's price margins are so high that they can easily afford to add vital features, when competitors have them and sell for less.

• repoman27 - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link

  Of course you don't care how things work, you just buy based on bullet points put forth buy the marketers.
  
  How's the throughput on the Gigabit Ethernet port in your display? Does your display have any USB 3.0 ports? Does the PC that it's connected to even have any?
  
  Yeah, and what you consider poor feature decisions have propelled Apple to the #1 ranking market cap in the world. Clearly shareholders are liking the feature set. How's the company that made that other brand doing these days? Dominating the market are they?

• AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link

  Apple is "#1 market cap" because of their marketing department. NOT feature set, nor value.

• Constructor - Thursday, September 29, 2011 - link

  You keep telling yourself that.
  
  In the real world, it is actually hard to make the right tradeoffs in product development. And cramming the absolute maximum number of paper features into a product quite often does a disservice to its actual usability and practical usefulness.
  
  Apple's meteoric rise and sky-high user loyalty in large part comes from them in fact making the right decisions in most of these tradeoffs.
  
  "Marketing" is a rather helpless catch-all pseudo-explanation for what many people (and even most competitors) simply fail to grasp. Which is why Apple is successful, and they are not.

• AnnonymousCoward - Friday, September 30, 2011 - link

  "paper features"
  "disservice to its actual usability and practical usefulness."
  
  -Oh, you mean like a mouse with a right-click button? Yeah, that's quite the paper feature with no practical usefulness!
  -Or maybe like putting a screen on an MP3 player. That's yet another worthless paper feature!
  -Or a monitor stand with height adjustment. That only looks good on paper! There's no practical usefulness here because every MacHead has a height-adjustable desk!
  
  And don't get me started on the lack of value. You can get a new 15.6" laptop with a C2D-based Intel processor for $280; Apple laptops start at $1000. A while back you could get Apple's 30" (which used an outdated LG panel) for $2000, versus Dell's 30" (with a newer and better LG panel) for $1500, and it had swivel.
  
  I credit the vast majority of Apple's success to their brilliant mass marketing.

• crispbp04 - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link

  i just dock my computer and don't have to get flustered over seven cables. snap in and move on. snap off and leave.

• Constructor - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link

  And all the while there's the massive docking station cluttering up your desk. Which can't be used with any other computer and cannot be adapted to should you need anything it doesn't happen to provide.
  
  I'm not saying that it can't be useful, just that Thunderbolt is quite a bit more flexible, more powerful and more convenient.

• dsumanik - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link

  How is that different from a piece of wood or a stack of books for the display to sit on because there is no height adjustment?

• Constructor - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link

  You'll need a display in addition to your docking station. The TBD already covers the docking needs, and you can still use the Air's keyboard and trackpad if you like, since there's only one thin cable going out from it, not much different from a USB keyboard cable.
  
  And as I explained before: Height adjustment built into the regular stands is usually too limited to be really useful where it's actually needed, and still fragile and wobbly at the same time (which is two things the iMac / Thunderbolt Display stand most certainly is not).
  
  Theoretically demanding all kinds of things is one thing. Ticking them off on a theoretical spec sheet is another.
  
  But the actual, practical reality is usually a completely different thing again. And that is what you have to deal with when you're actually constructing real-life hardware. It's not nearly as simple as is looks from the outside (I'm developing software, hardware and sometimes mechanical components for a living myself).
  
  Bitching is easy. Finding really good solutions for difficult problems is not.