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New Apple 27-inch Thunderbolt Display

flottenheimer

flottenheimer

macrumors 68000
Original poster
In a month or two I will need to buy an Apple Thunderbolt Display. With the new slim iMacs the current Thunderbolt Display design looks dated.

Furthermore the price is rather steep and MacRumors Buyer's Guide says 'Don't Buy'... Hmmm.

Has anyone got a qualified guess about when a new display might hit the stores?
 
No one knows. My guess is Apple is reserving the new displays for 27" iMacs before they use them for TBD. If I had to guess when they'll launch is early spring 2013. And don't expect that price to drop, it will either stay the same or go up.
 
madsci954 said:
No one knows. My guess is Apple is reserving the new displays for 27" iMacs before they use them for TBD. If I had to guess when they'll launch is early spring 2013. And don't expect that price to drop, it will either stay the same or go up.
Click to expand...

Well if thought about logically a new TBD would only come out along with a computer announcement of some sort... Given all the portables have been rolled out AND the iMacs as well as the Mac mini .... The best hope is it will get announced when the VERY overdue MacPro gets its day in the sun. Rumor mills are all over the place as to when this might happen but everyone is nearly certain it won't be till 2013 ... My guess is it'll roll out with either WWDC or NAB. 'Early 2013' just doesn't seem plausible.

Given NAB is early April that too might be a longshot.
 
There was a rumor predicting initial shortages with the new imacs. It's unlikely that these would be cpu/gpu shortages. They're more likely related to assembly, including the updated display process. I wouldn't expect anything until that initial surge passes. Beyond that there are conflicting factors. It's arguable that Apple would want some amount of uniformity for those using imac + thunderbolt display. This could be a very small percentage of sales though. The other thing is whether they want to continue the cinema display that has remained in production for pre - 2011 Macs including the Mac Pro going forward. There's no real guarantee of thunderbolt in an updated mac pro, given that it would take some extra engineering work on Apple's part regardless of what cpus are used. It doesn't matter if they're Sandy Bridge E or Ivy. Apple's priority for displays hasn't seemed too focused on the mac pro crowd, but I don't know if that will change again. Apple displays were quite popular in that market segment for a while there around the time of the aluminum cinema displays, but that dropped off a long time ago.
 
My wishlist

I've heard conflicting rumors that Thunderbolt allows graphics cards to go into display. So in theory someone with say, a 13" Retina Macbook Pro would get a performance boost when connected to the display. Add this and retina and I would be in. Probably a pipe dream though.
 
DaveGee said:
Well if thought about logically a new TBD would only come out along with a computer announcement of some sort .... The best hope is it will get announced when the VERY overdue MacPro gets its day in the sun.
Click to expand...

Except, if you look at the publicity for the ACD and TBD, they're very much being pitched as second monitors and docking stations for MacBooks.

I suspect a lot of Mac Pro customers will also go for specialist, third party monitors (the TBD is more 'prosumer') or different size combinations (I'd seriously consider 2 x 24" rather than 1 x 27" to go with a Mac Pro). There's also the question of whether a new Mac Pro would even support Thunderbolt as a display connector: a major selling point of the Mac Pro is the ability to take specialist graphics cards - they'd need some way of feeding their DisplayPort signals back to the motherboard so they could be fed through Thunderbolt.

cforbesdesign said:
I've heard conflicting rumors that Thunderbolt allows graphics cards to go into display. So in theory someone with say, a 13" Retina Macbook Pro would get a performance boost when connected to the display.
Click to expand...

AFAIK, yes, they could put the 'graphics card' in a Thunderbolt monitor - Thunderbolt is, after all, basically 'external PCIe'. The problem is that Thunderbolt only supports 2 PCIe lanes per port whereas high-end graphics cards prefer to sit in the 8x or 16x PCIe slot in a PC - they'd probably work on Thunderbolt, but with limited performance. Since even the MacBooks with Intel integrated graphics can drive an external monitor well enough for 2D use, its hard to see what the market is.
 
i am waiting for the: fully touchable (ahem touchscreen), 12K retina, voice activated siri, built in nespresso maker, TB-ultra, 3D FaceTime, which also sings to you! 😀
roll on 2020


in all due seriousness, a retina slimmer screen + usb3 doc would be a winner imho
 
Just buy! The current ones great.

The thinner iMac design looks nice, but surely 99% of your time you're staring at the front of it, not the side!
 
shorn said:
Just buy! The current ones great.

The thinner iMac design looks nice, but surely 99% of your time you're staring at the front of it, not the side!
Click to expand...

Omg people, the best thing about new imac and hopefully new acd/atd is not the slim design but less reflective display, so i would wait for sure
 
Ordered 2 ATD today from B&H that should be delivered by end of the week. 😀. Will use the FW port on wife's ATD for her backup drive. The USB 2 ports will be for keyboard, mouse, Wacom. Thunderbolt port will have external drives. Ethernet goes on the Ethernet port. We will use a USB 3 port on the rMBPs for syncing and charging iPhone and iPad. So for us, USB 3 on ATD is not critical.
 
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