How does Apple fit in a 49-watt speaker in the Thunderbolt Display

[Brandon263]

Is the Thunderbolt Display speaker better than 7-watt external speakers. It's pretty amazing that they could fit such a high-wattage speaker in such a small space.

 

[campyguy]

What Apple did was pretty amazing - I'm looking forward to the next iteration of their TB Display. I held out for over a year waiting for Apple to get off their butt to update their TB monitor. Sigh. But, I did tire of waiting, however, and here's how I spent my cash:

$525 on a Dell P2715Q, $175 on a Herman Miller Flo arm, $14 on a copy of SwitchResX, and $299 on Grado SR325e headphones (which I can plug into the P2715Q's output jack.

For a few more bucks than the outdated Apple TB monitor I got a 4k monitor that can put anywhere on my workstation courtesy of the Flo arm and killer cans that put any monitor's speakers to shame.

 

[Brian Y]

There's a lot of space inside the casing!

 

[Mikael H]

Is the Thunderbolt Display speaker better than 7-watt external speakers. It's pretty amazing that they could fit such a high-wattage speaker in such a small space.

I wasn't very impressed, to be honest. Sure, it's better-sounding than most integrated speakers I've heard, but if you're going to listen to anything for real, you'll still in all likelihood want a good set of headphones or studio monitors.

Wattage by itself is a very poor measurement of actual sound power, since there are many ways of measuring it, and you need to make sure you're comparing apples to apples.