A few questions to Thunderbolt Display and MBA 2011 owners

enigma2k said:

Hi,

I want to get a Thunderbolt display for my MBA 13" 2011.

A have a few questions, however:

1) Can the MBA drive the animations of the display smoothly? e.g. Launchpad, Missions Control, etc

2) Does the fan of the MBA go higher while the Thunderbolt display is plugged in?

3) What is the exact length of the thunderbolt cable coming out of the display? and is it possible to extend it? (don't have the MBA on the same desk)

Click to expand...

1. yes, it can, however, when I have 2 word documents open on a space and I switch between the spaces, there is some stuttering. It seems to be related to word, as I haven't seen it with other programs.

2. No. unless you start doing stuff that requires a lot of CPU/GPU activity, driving the thunderbolt doesn't seem to require any more power.

3. I don't have a tape measure here, so I did it with a 6" ruler. Seems to be 36" to the "knot" where the two cables split and 12" after the split. Hope that is enough for you.

I just have it two days now and I'm really, really enjoying it!

I also have a TD display, powered by a 13" i5 Air. I do notice some shuttering when I move between screens (left and right), but the rest of the animations seem fine.

I'm guessing for now there will be no way to extend the Thunderbolt cable - there's a chip housed inside the connector (and one at each end of an Apple TB cable) and I suspect that it's not going to play nicely with any kind of extension cable until someone designs one with active chips at each end. If it's even possible since I've read that the chips in the connectors are tuned to the resistance of the cable itself to compensate for signal loss.