Apple 27" Thunderbolt Displays Shipping to Stores

That thing really does not deserve 999 dollars.

I will wait for price drop or might as well as go for 27 inch imac.

Nice. Now give me my "anti-glare" version and I'm sold x2. :D

Nice. Now give me my "anti-glare" version and I'm sold x2. :D

Exactly why I am now using a Dell 27" monitor. And as long as there is no anti-glare iMac I'd rather replace my old white iMac by a mini.

If I want to see myself, I look in the mirror.

Pffff.

Matte would be better...

Too bad Apple is in love with glass, maybe that will change with a future imac/display design.

That thing really does not deserve 999 dollars.

I will wait for price drop or might as well as go for 27 inch imac.

If you're in the market for a 27" monitor at 2560x1440, you'll have a hard time finding one that costs much less than 999 big ones. This was my conclusion before I got the last-gen ACD a while back, and I stand by it now. After buying that ACD, I was also pleasantly surprised by the audio quality of the speakers and sub-woofer too. I ended up scapping plans to buy a 2.1 set for the computer, which would've set me back around $150-200 (that was the budget I had in mind). I know I got my value for $999.

The new ACD has only more features than the last gen, no features removed (correct?), and all this without a price hike -- in spite of significant increases in consumer prices (and the cost of living in general) over the past few years. I'd wholeheartedly endorse the current ACD, as long as you don't have a compelling need for a matte screen. Different ballgame there.

Edit: point well taken about the $854.69 UltraSharp, but I note that it's showing $20.49 for shipping there too. Has anyone here done a side-by-side comparison of the UltraSharp and ACD?

All they need now is a Mac Pro that supports Thunderbolt.

Just to reiterate a couple points, while you can connect any DisplayPort 1.1a compliant display to a Thunderbolt host controller, Apple is pretty clear that the ATD must be connected to a Thunderbolt port, which makes sense when you think about it.

Thunderbolt does support bus powered devices, but the ATD requires way more than the bus can provide, and thus A/C power—despite the lack of power cords in the glamour shots.

As for USB 3.0 being left out, some back of the envelope calculations show that the ATD with just the connections it does provide could utilize 84% of the 10 Gbps available on one Thunderbolt channel. The video signal alone requires at least 5.8 Gbps, so there wouldn't be much room to breathe if you added USB 3.0 to that pipe as well. A single USB 3.0 host controller is able to pump the better part of 5 Gbps by itself. When they eventually hit the market, you could always add a Thunderbolt to 4 port USB 3.0 adapter, which would be fine because it would utilize the second TB channel.

The complaints about the price of this device are insane when you add up the cost of the individual components in it. First we have the 27" 2560x1440 IPS display and Thunderbolt controller. Then we have a 1280x720 video camera with microphone, no biggie. Then a 2.1 speaker system with a 49 watt amp. Marinate on that one—show me another display with a built in amp anywhere near 49 watts. Then we have 3 powered USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port and a Gigabit Ethernet port. These are not pass through ports pulled off of an attached computer, they all have their own host controllers and are hooked to the Thunderbolt controller via PCIe. And don't forget the MagSafe charger and Thunderbolt cable that come attached to the ATD. Go ahead and add up how much it would cost to buy all these things separately and get back to me.

For all y'all bitching at Apple for the steps backwards from the 30" ACD, I think the blame really has to be directed at least in part at the panel manufacturers. With the much broader consumer electronics market (televisions) demanding cheap 16:9 displays, that's exactly where they focused. The vast majority of displays on the market today, regardless of size, top out at 1920x1080. I'm pretty sure that's also why you don't see Apple making a smaller version of the ATD. There's nothing under 27" at greater than 1920x1080 and the competition in the 1920x1080 market is brutal. Who needs yet another 1920x1080 display?

For those trying to connect multiple monitors without Thunderbolt, there are several DisplayPort to 3 DVI port adapters available. So you can hook 2 or 3 DVI-D enabled displays to a Mac or PC with a single DP/MiniDP/TB port. http://i.dell.com/images/global/products/monitors/mmh11.pdf

The polished glass in front of Apple displays is just integral to the current design language. There is no way to make these devices look as attractive and seamless as they do without the full frontal glass. I recommended applying an anti-glare film, and someone quickly responded that they had tried these and that they made the screen look worse. You can imagine that Apple tried a lot of things, and in the end this was the best they could come up with. What then, is the best panel on the market with a matte finish, and does it have any glass in front of it at all? I'm pretty sure the glass adds considerably to the durability of these displays and not just to the amount of glare they produce.

I wish they worked on PCs as well.

I would love one for my ASP.net development.

Why? You can do better for this amount of money.

A Dell Ultra Sharp of that size will cost you $949.

Nope. $854.69 on Amazon right now.

I don't understand why apple does not have a anti glare option?
Many continuously request it. Does anyone have a plausible reason why apple refuses?

One possible reason: less choice. Less compromises. Not having to make a difficult decision between better colors/sharpness/etc. but glossy vs. anti-glare coating limitations and matte.

This is also a good thing for people who don't care. Given that choice, they'd have to scratch their head, and there is no clear "best" option - each choice has its advantages and disadvantages. So they might not make a choice at all.

Basically, see this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_overload) and this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less).

The questions is how many these 'many' are? 1%, 10% of potential iMac/27"Apple display buyers?

Did you just pull those numbers out of thin air? Yes, I think you did. Why not 25% or even 40%? Personally, I'd like to see some statistics for when they did offer matte screens at the same price as glossy. Apple never provided ANY explanation for removing the matte option. All we have is Steve Jobs telling us he likes to see his own reflection in the screen.

Some people might prefer black computers (or white computers), any plausible reason why Apple refuses?

I think they do now offer white iPhones, etc. and used to offer both black and white options for Macbooks until Steve decided everyone prefers metal (in the OS too).

Do you seriously believe for one second those decisions were made by what the public WANTS? Hell no. It's all about what Steve wants and he has said as much. He doesn't care what people want. He thinks he knows better than the public and because Apple has done well that belief has been reinforced over and over again. It's why he thinks there should be no gaming or mid-range tower Mac. He doesn't like them. He calls them trucks. He likes THIN THIN THIN. People buy them, yes, but people have NO OTHER CHOICE except to abandon the Mac platform itself entirely and most people I know like the Mac because of the operating system, not the freaking 'thinness' of the computer.

People who dislike glossy naturally like to portray it as only an issue of (3) because it puts Apple under moral pressure (which they hope will make them change their stance). But in reality, reasons (1) and (2) are very likely also to play a non-negligible part and denying this is somewhat dishonest (and self-serving).

And people who continually defend everything Apple does portray their own inability to think for themselves, make decisions for themselves and do anything but follow the leader even if he jumps off the proverbial bridge. It's why the word fan is based on the word FANATIC.

All my drive enclosures have FireWire 800 interfaces, so I already enjoy transfer speeds that are routinely 2-3x faster than USB 2.0. Under the right

Congratulations. You paid too much for performance that could be readily beaten by USB3.0 for 1/3 less money. FW800 devices have never been cheap and I don't see Thunderbolt drives being any different, perhaps more yet relatively speaking. And while you appear to think USB3.0 over TB is a bad idea, you congratulate Apple for offering FW800, which when used with a modern drive simply chokes the speed on the interface end rather than a potential bus speed limit. At least USB 3.0 over TB could potentially give you the full speed of the drive part of the time while Firewire limits the drive ALL of the time.

conditions, a USB 3.0 enclosure with a single HDD can achieve double the transfer rates of FW 800, but most of the time the performance advantage is much less, and if you have multiple devices connected to a single USB 3.0 host controller, the advantage can swing back in favor of FW 800.

Here it sounds like you're trying to convince yourself it's OK that your FW800 drives are taking twice as much time to transfer large files as USB3.0. The point is if the bandwidth is available and the drives are cheaper, USB3.0 kicks FW800's butt from here to the Alamo.

Can you even imagine the reaction if the first Apple product to ship with USB 3.0 was a display and not a Mac? Seriously, did anyone think that was in the

I imagine that I, for one, would be applauding that they finally embraced it period. Instead, my reaction is that I'd be a moron to buy a monitor today that cannot run Apple's USB 3.0 interface all their computers will have starting next year (since it will be included in Intel's chipset by default). Buying this product today is buying obsolescence right from the start.

Besides, the silicon and drivers for USB 3.0 are just barely maturing to the point where you would choose to include them as anything more than a checklist feature.

A checklist feature? :confused:

I've had my 3TB USB 3.0 drives for over a year. They can do around 30MB/sec under USB 2.0. A similar drive in a FW800 enclosure can do up to 100MB/sec. With USB 3.0, it can do around 140MB/sec. Faster drives or combinations of drives could easily do twice that. Personally, I move a lot of large files seeing I keep all my movies on a server hard drive. Going 40% slower in the name of pride doesn't do anything for me.

It's Apple's fault for creating and shipping the most capable I/O interface in the history of consumer electronics, and a truly one-of-a-kind
display/docking station solution based on it... Have you or anyone else developed an I/O interface with more potential than Thunderbolt? Can you produce a more elegant display solution than the ATD? Why haven't you or anyone else brought this to market yet? Apple produces a landmark product, and people bitch about what features Apple didn't give them this time around. It's not Apple's fault that you can't produce what you want yourself and depend on them to design your toys.

This post gets my nomination for the biggest suck up to Apple of the year. :rolleyes:

And asking people why the personally haven't designed something is just downright ridiculous. I haven't designed it because that is not my job (or most others on here). WTF does that have to do with people making stupid decisions at Apple? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. :rolleyes:

Yeah, I'm beginning to think that high quality matte displays only exist sans glass, and that the design aesthetic and added durability of the seamless glass front is what is dictating glossy for Apple. Not just the fact that it annoys a lot of people.

Believe it or not, it is possible to make a non-reflective screen with glass (or other type materials like high index plastic). My glasses have it and I get no reflections in them. Apple is obsessed with glass because Steve is obsessed with glass. Whether any of that changes under the new CEO remains to be seen. I think as long as Steve is pulling the strings at Apple in any fashion what-so-ever, we'll continue to get underpowered ultra-thin products with batteries that cannot easily be replaced by the user.