Thunderbolt Displays Shipping to Customers

I am now the proud owner of a Thunderbolt Display. I've been calling the local apple store daily checking if they've arrived, figured if they showed up before my online order shipped, I'd just cancel and buy from the store. Well, they showed up at the store yesterday, so I did exactly that.

Brought it home (it is HUGE!) plugged it all in, and noticed that none of the devices I was connecting to the monitor (usb keyboard, gigabit ethernet, firewire 800 drive) were connecting to the mac. I was getting power to the drive, but the laptop wasn't seeing any of the devices. I rebooted the macbook air, and I was off to the races, no issues after that.

Not really much to say about the display, it's gorgeous, just as gorgeous as apple displays are supposed to be. But the docking capabilities are just wonderful. I use aperture a lot, and the ssd on the mb air isn't big enough to hold my library (not even close...) So I keep the library on an iomega drive, which I used to connect to my old mb pro with firewire 800. Since I got the air, I've been using USB 2.0, and aperture has been much slower. Now with the thunderbolt display, I'm back on firewire 800 and it's fast as hell.

Also noticing major boosts from being on gigabit ethernet. Even though I don't generally do much to tax the bandwidth of my wifi n, there must be a lot of latency issues, because everything runs so much faster over gigabit.

Long story short, the display is the absolute perfect companion for the macbook air, even moreso than a macbook pro since the display gives you capabilities (firewire 800, gigabit) that the laptop doesn't even have, as opposed to a mb pro which has firewire 800 and gigabit already.

It's almost as if they designed these products to work together......... ;)