Apple Thunderbolt You don’t have to be an Apple fanboy to appreciate the new Apple Thunderbolt Display ($999 direct), but you will need to have a Thunderbolt-ready Mac destkop or laptop to use it, and be willing to shell out close to a grand for the privilege. This 27-inch beauty is the first display to utilize Thunderbolt I/O technology, and its connectivity prowess makes it an ideal docking station for Thunderbolt-enabled MacBooks. It also delivers bright, accurate colors and excellent image detail. Its flaws—a relatively slow response time produces some motion artifacts, and a glossy screen coating that can be very reflective—is somewhat minor compared with what it has to offer. It earns our Editors’ Choice for high-end monitors.
A word about Thunderbolt technology; co-developed by Intel and Apple, Thunderbolt is a dual-channel I/O solution (based on PCI Express and DisplayPort technologies) that delivers twice the I/O performance (10Gbps) as USB 3.0 (5Gbps) using a single cable. According to Apple, Thunderbolt is up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0 and 12 times faster than FireWire 800. All of that bandwidth allows users to daisy chain multiple peripherals and still achieve good I/O throughput. (For more on Thunderbolt, check out our primer, “Intel’s Thunderbolt: 10 Things You Need to Know.”)
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Apple Thunderbolt Design and Features
Design-wise, the Thunderbolt Display looks exactly like the Apple Cinema Display. The 27-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 resolution IPS (in-plane switching) panel is housed in the same silver aluminum cabinet and is supported by the same angled stand which contains a smooth, easy to maneuver tilt mechanism. You can’t adjust the panel’s height or swivel it for a better angle, however. Edge-to-edge glass over piano black bezels and rounded corners provide plenty of style, but the glossy glass is very reflective. Apple logos can be found on the rear of the cabinet and on the lower front bezel, and a FaceTime HD camera is embedded in the upper bezel. The cabinet also holds a 2.1 audio system (two speakers and a subwoofer) that delivers 49 watts of rich, crystal clear sound with incredibly deep bass response. It is hands-down the best audio output I’ve heard from a desktop display and a good deal better than a number of HDTVs that I’ve reviewed.
You won’t find any function buttons on this monitor, as all settings are adjusted from within the System Preferences Display control panel. Here, you can change the resolution, rotate the screen image, adjust brightness, and select a color profile. There’s also a Calibration Assistant that helps you tweak gamma and white point settings. Chances are you won’t have to do much tweaking as Apple calibrates each panel before it leaves the factory. As with the Cinema Display, a light sensor automatically adjusts the panel’s brightness according to ambient light levels, but you can disable this function if you prefer.
Apple Thunderbolt Specifications
- Screen Size
- 27 inches
- Native Resolution
- 2560 x 1440
- Apple Thunderbolt Supported Video Formats
- 1080p
- Widescreen
- Yes
- Apple Thunderbolt Aspect Ratio
- 16:9
- Apple Thunderbolt PC Interfaces
- Thunderbolt
Two hard-wired cables protrude from the rear of the cabinet. One is a traditional three-pronged power cord and the other is a double header containing Apple’s awesome MagSafe power connector and a Thunderbolt connector. One of the many cool features of this display is that once you plug in the regular power cord you can power up and charge your laptop with the monitor’s MagSafe plug. Also around back are three USB (2.0) ports, a FireWire 800 port, a gigabit Ethernet port, and a Thunderbolt port. It’s not unusual to find an Ethernet port on an HDTV but you rarely see them on desktop monitors. I connected a labs Ethernet cable to the display, and thanks to Thunderbolt, received a wired network connection notification on my MacBook Air within seconds. You can use the display’s Thunderbolt port to connect up to six peripherals, such as external storage and video capture devices, as well as multiple monitors.
Apple Thunderbolt Performance
As with most IPS panels, the Thunderbolt Display delivers very accurate colors. Swatches from the DisplayMate Color Scales test scaled uniformly from dark to light and there was no evidence of tinting or over saturated reds, greens, or blues. The panel’s inky blacks gave the colors some pop as well. Grayscale performance was also quite good, particularly on the light end of the scale where every shade of gray was displayed correctly. Dark grays were well defined right up to the very darkest shade, which was slightly compressed and indistinguishable from black. Shadow detail was still very good, however; dark scenes from the HD movie trailer I Am Legend were strikingly detailed and skin tones were spot on. Only the NEC MultiSync PA301W($2,229 direct, 4.5 stars) did a better job with dark grays, but that’s a professional-grade monitor that costs $1,200 more than the Thunderbolt Display. If you work with large documents and prefer to arrange them side-by-side, the Thunderbolt Display is ideal for viewing small text; the font’s 5.3 points (the smallest available on the DisplayMate Scaled Fonts test) were completely legible and well defined.
IPS panels are known to deliver wide viewing angles, and the Thunderbolt Display is no exception. You can place this monitor just about anywhere without worrying about color shifting or experiencing that dark screen effect that you get with most TN+ panels. What you will get is some instances of motion blur, however, which comes by way of the Thunderbolt Display’s 12-millisecond pixel response. The artifacts aren’t overwhelming and certainly won’t have much of an impact while watching streaming video (which is usually susceptible to artifacts anyway), but if you decide to use this monitor for gaming you’ll notice some minor motion lag. That’s just one of the trade-offs that come with using an IPS panel rather than a TN+ panel, though.
There’s a lot to like about the Apple Thunderbolt Display. It’s the first monitor to offer Thunderbolt high-speed connectivity, it delivers excellent image quality, and its audio output is top shelf. Having the ability to connect multiple devices makes it an ideal base station for MacBook laptops, and like nearly every other product sporting an Apple logo, it’s a real head turner. It is certainly more expensive than most 27-inch monitors, but no other monitor can do what it does, at least not yet. All this is why this monitor earns the Editors’ Choice. If you own a Thunderbolt-enabled MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, or iMac, the Thunderbolt Display makes perfect sense.
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