Apple Discontinues Thunderbolt Display

[monstruo]

Not surprise that Apple is discontinuing the TBD and not having any plans to release a new display. Tim, the beloved ceo by Apple board of directors, also the man who declared the end of PC-era and said this:

“Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones...”

End users don't need a 20 over inch monitor. An iPad Pro does more than what a pro needs!

 

[anomie]

best comment ever

I hope that well hidden irony, because I was thinking "really, that joke AGAIN?"
[doublepost=1466754641][/doublepost]

still isnt stopping them from taking it out.

vote with your dollars, people. if enough of you stay home, Apple *will* listen.

Yeah I am going to vote with my money. Please, Apple, get rid of that ancient jack and give me a thinner, waterproof iPhone. And please DO NOT listen to the nerds at MR.

 

[RuffyYoshi]

eh, it was waaaaay overpriced anyway. You can get a really nifty rotating ultrasharp screen from Dell for 300 euros. And it has really thin bezels!

 

[allanfries]

Still rockin' my 2010 Cinema display, which i got on a trade over 3 years ago.

 

[swingerofbirch]

To not even give it a price cut as they sell their remaining stock . . . it just seems disrespectful. I feel like Apple has been disrespectful generally toward Mac users. My grandparents' first computer was a 17" iMac that finally broke down. My dad was telling them should get a Mac mini, and I was explaining to him how they haven't updated them in so long, how they come with slow spinning drives, etc. And knowing my grandparents and how they don't follow tech news at all, I'm sure they'd go to the store and just buy whatever Apple monitor goes with the computer.

 

[alexanderasher]

Sucks. Honestly this is the best looking display I've seen on the market.

However Thunderbolt 3 has a different port shape so they could be just having issues getting a 5k display to work properly.

 

[monstruo]

Even with new 5K display. Most of older r/mb/p won't be able support it.

 

[iKrivetko]

Long due, pretty sure we are going to see it updated quite soon.

 

[seb101]

I hope this changes their belligerent support approach to 3rd party displays.

I've had an issue with my Macbook Pro and 2 external Dell displays over Display Port for several months now, which results in graphics glitches (flickering, artifacts etc.). Apple support will simply not acknowledge it as a problem, blaming everything from the displays, to the cables, to the connection method. Despite the fact the same screens work fine with Windows running on the same Mac.

TO compound the problem, OSX still does not support DP1.2 daisy-chaining meaning you cannot run two generic 3rd-party screens from a single connection.

 

[dysamoria]

Apple has officially jumped the shark

No no. They did that the year of iOS 7. It's been a slow motion car crash since, in terms of design and usability. The lack of solid vision for the company and product has allowed the return of the industry BS of "keep re-buying the same thing from us" and "look, we rearranged the shape/UI, that means it's better, so go re-buy it again!"

All Apple has today are minimalist hipster "designers" without any real understanding of function, and "masters of business administration" types.

 

[thekeyring]

Okay. So this is the direction Apple is taking.
Unless Apple exceeds my expectations with the MacBook Pro refresh, I'm done with this company. There's nothing for me here anymore.

Let us know how that goes.
[doublepost=1466757238][/doublepost]

No no. They did that the year of iOS 7. It's been a slow motion car crash since, in terms of design and usability. The lack of solid vision for the company and product has allowed the return of the industry BS of "keep re-buying the same thing from us" and "look, we rearranged the shape/UI, that means it's better, so go re-buy it again!"

All Apple has today are minimalist hipster "designers" without any real understanding of function, and "masters of business administration" types.

You guys are insane.

 

[andyyau]

No no. They did that the year of iOS 7. It's been a slow motion car crash since, in terms of design and usability. The lack of solid vision for the company and product has allowed the return of the industry BS of "keep re-buying the same thing from us" and "look, we rearranged the shape/UI, that means it's better, so go re-buy it again!"

All Apple has today are minimalist hipster "designers" without any real understanding of function, and "masters of business administration" types.

Exactly. After iOS 7, I rarely use iDevice. My iPad has been charged once in 2016.

I can't find the major difference after iOS7 and get no interest to know. Those are just useless update for me.
I don't need 3x larger of emoji too.

 

[dysamoria]

Doesn't matter, there's always an exception. The vast majority... well actually, damn near everyone else doesn't care for thunderbolt; the devices are all expensive, it's limited to pretty much only Macs, and there aren't many things that actually need thunderbolt anyway. Essentially, it's another Apple failure just like Firewire.

You're repeating a tech geek meme, not stating fact. FireWire was no failure. Thunderbolt would be proud to have been even half as successful as FireWire 400/800 was. FireWire wasn't for end users. The higher cost of the chipsets quickly put an end to building consumer FireWire gear but not FireWire itself. Talk to video professionals working in the early 2000s. It was on all Sony digital cameras as "Sony iLink". Lots of hard drives, optical disc writers, pro audio interfaces, drum scanners, etc. had FireWire.

FireWire kicked the crap out of USB for time-sensitive data delivery. Even USB 2, with a technically superior data speed rating, failed in reliability on delivery time. Optical disc writing in USB fails more than on FireWire. Yeah, few people write optical discs anymore. That doesn't mean optical discs "failed".

If you weren't using it, you probably didn't need to. You are probably not the type of user it was made to serve. Other people used it. Video and audio users still use it today, though it has definitely been superseded.

FireWire didn't fail. It's merely obsolete after a decade of success in the professional content creation environment. The hybridization of USB and thunderbolt into one bus is the successor format for both consumer and professional interfaces... If Intel and Apple get off their lazy asses. It's too bad that Intel and Apple have been utterly pathetic at getting thunderbolt established thus far. It's likely to do with Apple having no interest in evangelizing to the professional content creation tools/users markets. Apple makes consumer product now and shareholders don't give a damn about what product keeps them flush with pride in their stock portfolio.

 

[mw360]

Would have been a lot easier to hide this announcement behind the supposedly imminent MacPro 7,1 reveal. Looks like the MP is dead too.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

Not a surprising decision really. As others have said, there are now better quality and value alternatives on the market, so this product serves little purpose at the current price.

Apple will have known surely known this for a while, which is why they refrained from updating it. The addition of HDMI on Macs and, now, USB-C, only points toward a direction where Apple have nothing to offer over their competitors.

 

[Phoenixx]

The new Apple is maximizing profit without worrying what consumers want. Aka: let's keep our product designs the same because people buy them. Also let's get rid of the headphone jack and promote it as a feature which benefits users....Their whole product portfolio is just so aged it's a joke but people keep buying everything..

I spent several hours today changing my primary machine from an iMac to a Windows 10 based PC. Some of us have had enough.

 

[patent10021]

More signs of the Tim Cook era. Steve would never not have an Apple display kicked butt.

 

[mw360]

Not a surprising decision really. As others have said, there are now better quality and value alternatives on the market, so this product serves little purpose at the current price.

To which Apple product does this not apply?

 

[dysamoria]

You, among many others, are missing the point. They don't care about the discontinuation, it's the lack of a new model that is disappointing. We've been waiting on the edge of our collective seats for a retina Thunderbolt Display and to hear they won't sell the old one but also won't make a new one is what's truly sad.

This is EXACTLY the problem.

The 2013 Mac Pro would've been the new machine for me if it had been paired with a Retina display on release. I've been waiting for that combo since 2013 failed to deliver it.

It's been almost 3 years since the last Mac Pro announcement. Every year I hope "this might be it". Every year I continue doing almost nothing with my photography and music because I can't afford to blow my single wad of cash on the wrong computer setup. I can buy one new setup that must last about a decade. PC hardware and software feels like torture anymore (partially thanks to Apple showing how good computing child be... before walking off that path). I can't afford to buy a new iMac or MacBook every time one dies from bad heat dissipation engineering. For casual consumer use, they're great machines, but don't run them hot all day, all week, for years...

Now it seems Apple has declared what I've been waiting for is NEVER coming. Why did I move my production to a Mac if Apple is just going to discontinue it in a slow motion car crash, while focusing on luxury consumer electronics (and a freaking CAR???)?

It used to be a mindless and incorrect meme when people said Apple product was needless luxury. It was worth it. iPhone and Snow Leopard made me a convert. Now that luxury meme is becoming accurate.

I like my iPad Pro (despite the lousy GUI). I start music projects on it, sometimes, and it's an amazing consumer device with clear utility and incredible power in such a compact device... but it is NOT a production workstation. It's awkward for heavy word processing sessions (yes, I have the keyboard) and incapable of desktop publishing or complex vector/3D graphics. It's utterly useless for raw photo processing (and cannot handle massive amounts of data anyway).

It is not capable of being an actual content-creation workstation today, and it won't be in the next five to ten years... unless someone discovers a new magical technology that dramatically changes what we know about storing and processing data at high speeds. MacBooks and iMacs are disposable short-life products I can't afford to repeatedly buy.

Apple is content to let Windows and PCs continue to take all content creation professionals? It's not a small market... unless compared to consumer electronics. And that's the problem with the leadership at Apple: MBA thinkers. Consumer products are inevitably unreliable markets, but they're the most stunning because of fads, so that's where the shortsighted myopic focus goes. Apple's incredible luck will only last so long. When the ballon bursts, what core competency will they fall back on?Software isn't it. iOS-porting destroyed iWork on the Mac and iOS 9 is a disgrace to its lineage. For crying out loud, I can't even select text in this box without all kinds of selection bugs (which I've reported and they've gone unfixed for many revisions, but we keep getting "features"...).

 

[hagar]

Long due, pretty sure we are going to see it updated quite soon.

Why does this article imply a new screen is coming? Apple is clearly getting out of the display business and they're referring to third party solutions. If a new screen were on the horizon, they would not make this announcement. It's clearly over for Apple displays. Don't read more into this than there is.

 

[ghost187]

The force will be strong with this thread.

 

[Erdbeertorte]

I use the Thunderbolt port on my iMac. Best thing ever for external storage.

Me too. I always preferred it and use it mainly for backup drives, OS installers, boot drive for a second OS installation... And also sometimes to connect a MacBook Pro or Air for migration.
It's just much more reliable and always fast. With Thunderbolt 2 and an external PCIe SDD you could even get near the speed of the much overpriced internal SSDs. USB 3.0 can't even get the full speed of a standard SATA-III SSD.

And especially the 5K Skylake Late 2015 iMacs still have strange unfixed USB 3.0 issues. I also often heard about USB 3.0 problems on other Macs too since El Capitan.

I use those ports only for my two Logitech USB receivers that came with the solar keyboard and a very old mouse, also for my iPhones to backup/sync and for my printer. None of them need USB 3.0 and work without any problem.
But USB 3.0 is just horrible on that iMac. There are many problems like slowing down to USB 2.0 speed or random disconnections.
It's packaged at the moment because I am moving so I could not test 10.12 yet on that iMac but they did not manage to fix those issues until 10.11.6 beta 2.

There are some nice monitors from Dell and LG that connect via Thunderbolt and even at least one of them uses Thunderbolt 2.
But if I remember correctly none of them is 5K and the screen size would be 29- and 34-inch or even curved. All of them just does not match in design, size and resolution.
A 27-inch 5K from Dell would waste both Thuderbolt 2.0 ports with a Displayport 1.2 connection what is also no good solution.
Using a second 5K iMac to match the design completely does only work if you run it with it's own OS installation because there is no possibility to connect the two displays.

Really sad...

I remember when the 2013 Mac Pro was released, Apple already began selling a 34-inch LG Thunderbolt monitor in their own online store. At least in Germany. Maybe they even had them in their physical stores as well back then but I don't know.
That was the first sign when I thought there will never be a new Apple display again. I think they only stopped selling it because of the 5K iMac. It had been there for quite a while and some other authorised resellers that only sold almost the same stuff as the Apple store also sold that monitor.

 

[SvP]

More signs of the Tim Cook era. Steve would never not have an Apple display kicked butt.

The gif you posted has a whoooole different meaning than you think it does.

Oh and stop talking like you're talking about your long lost buddy Steve. He would have told you.. well nothing i guess; you don't even know what moves you.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Thoughts?

Great! Outdated, overpriced tech is not part of a modern solution. It was a problem.

 

[pmau]

Somehow Apple is starting to lose ground on software and hardware.
Oh well, if there's no great MacBook in September, things are getting weird.

A 5k display would be strange to run standard hardware (other than Apple), I would love a TB3 display in standard 4k and great design.

But ... it won't happen.

Sad ... and the above poster saying it's not the discontinuing, it's the lack of new products, is absolutely spot on.

Sad addition ... I want a new MacPro.

Sad Big Emoji.