Report Claims Apple Launching New 27-Inch 5K Display Later This Year

Meh... Let me say it again.. Meh... I've really no interest in getting a 4k or 5k screen that is so hard on the graphic's card that it can hardly play any games.

I'm getting my LG 34UM94 (not the 95, thats old, had issues, only 1 year warranty) - It's an awesome UltraWide 34" 3440 x 1440p screen with 3 year warranty. As a bonus it has two Thunderbolt 2 ports, 2 HDMI, 1 Display port, three USB3 and is only 30% harder to run than a standard 27" 1440p screen.

This should last me years to come....

You're not the intended audience if you think a few-thousand-dollar 5K screeen is for gaming...

Meh... Let me say it again.. Meh... I've really no interest in getting a 4k or 5k screen that is so hard on the graphic's card that it can hardly play any games.

Lol this screen isn't for gaming haha

I hope they keep the current 27-inch around but cut the price in half. It is over priced right now.

Meh... Let me say it again.. Meh... I've really no interest in getting a 4k or 5k screen that is so hard on the graphic's card that it can hardly play any games.

I'm getting my LG 34UM94 (not the 95, thats old, had issues, only 1 year warranty) - It's an awesome UltraWide 34" 3440 x 1440p screen with 3 year warranty. As a bonus it has two Thunderbolt 2 ports, 2 HDMI, 1 Display port, three USB3 and is only 30% harder to run than a standard 27" 1440p screen.

This should last me years to come....

Meh... Let me say it again.. Meh... I've really no interest in getting a 4k or 5k screen that is so hard on the graphic's card that it can hardly play any games.

I'm getting my LG 34UM94 (not the 95, thats old, had issues, only 1 year warranty) - It's an awesome UltraWide 34" 3440 x 1440p screen with 3 year warranty. As a bonus it has two Thunderbolt 2 ports, 2 HDMI, 1 Display port, three USB3 and is only 30% harder to run than a standard 27" 1440p screen.

This should last me years to come....

Can't believe this is the top comment. Most Apple users aren't Apple users for gaming, and most Thunderbolt Display (and Cinema before them) purchasers are graphic designers, video editors, photographers, etc. We buy quality monitors not for the fast refresh rate or anything else but for the quality of the image on screen. With us designers having to make higher and higher pixel density graphics assets for all of these retina devices, the extra pixels are definitely worth the money to professionals.

Anyway, the main reason I'm holding out on upgrading my Mac is that I'm waiting to see how this whole situation shakes out. I don't want to buy something that won't be able to run these next-generation displays. I can't wait to get them, but I just hope they don't cost a whole lot more than the current one does. Ideally a new Mac Pro and TB2 Display will be out by this time next year and I can upgrade then. Could one of the things delaying this launch be requiring Thunderbolt 3? The current Thunderbolt displays also run USB, ethernet and other stuff you can plug into the back. Can Thunderbolt 2 handle an upgrade to 5K (cinema 4K or whatever) and several USB 3.0 ports? We might need to upgrade to that 50Gb/s or 100Gb/s fiber optic Thunderbolt stuff Intel has been working on for a while now. But that's just speculation on my part.

Save your money.

Why? Can't take it with you.

...The firm claims that the display will boast a 5120 x 2880 resolution, which would be significantly higher than the 2560 x 1440 resolution found on the current Apple Thunderbolt Display (ttp://www.macrumors.com/roundup/displays/)...

Or, you know, exactly 4x the resolution.

However, it is unknown as to how exactly Apple would power such a high resolution display with the current DisplayPort 1.2 standard used in Thunderbolt 2 (https://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/). A number of Apple's computers including the Mac Pro (late 2013), 27-inch iMac (late 2013), and Retina MacBook Pro (late 2013 and mid 2014) are able to power 4K displays (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6008) with one Thunderbolt port, but can only do so at designated refresh rates...

Well, not so much designated as simply limited by the available bandwidth of the interface used.

It is more likely that Apple would release a new monitor with a "Cinema 4K" resolution of 4096 x 2160, which is the maximum supported resolution by the DisplayPort 1.2 standard. Such a monitor would also be able to take advantage of the 20 Gbps data transfer rate of Thunderbolt 2 to stabilize performance at a high resolution...

There isn't really a set maximum resolution for DisplayPort, just limits to the maximum available bandwidth. If you drop the color depth and refresh rate down, you can go way higher than 4096 x 2160. Even if you're talking about 24 bpp, 60 Hz, DP 1.2 can still do 4096 x 2560. And seriously, what does that last bit even mean!!!

An 27-inch 5K ultra high-definition monitor from Apple would also come after Dell's 5K display (https://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/05/dell-5k-display/), which was announced last month and boast a 5120 x 2880 resolution at 218 pixels per inch. It is also unknown as to what technology Dell with use to power the monitor, although AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8496/dell-previews-27inch-5k-ultrasharp-monitor-5120x2880) speculates that the company may use Multi-Stream Transport (MST) to stitch together two 2560 x 2880 panels in order to provide 5120 pixels horizontally...

Most people power monitors with electricity...

Although Ian over at Anandtech revised his speculation at least once due to a math derp, I'm pretty sure he never implied that two panels would be used, merely that the panel would be driven as multiple tiles in the same way that pretty much all current 4K displays are. And despite mentions of MST in the comments section, the article clearly states that two DP 1.2 connections were most likely. MST or no, a single DP 1.2 / Thunderbolt 2 port cannot drive a 5120 x 2880 display at 24 bpp, 60 Hz. DP 1.2 only goes up to 17.28 Gbit/s and HDMI 2.0 up to 14.4 Gbit/s, whereas a single 2560 x 2880, 24 bpp, 60 Hz tile would require just over 11.6 Gbit/s. This display would need two cables to support 60 Hz operation.

Can't make a retina Air this year? Yet making a 5K display for this year already?

I'll have to see it to believe it. None of those mobile CPUs / GPUs in the current iMacs can run 5K with multiple displays while simultaneously editing 4K content smoothly.

Good thing the new $1099 21.5-inch iMac is the only iMac to ever use a mobile CPU, and the 27-inch is available with up to a Core i7-4771 and GTX 780M (mobile GPU yes, but certainly no slouch).

Meh... Let me say it again.. Meh... I've really no interest in getting a 4k or 5k screen that is so hard on the graphic's card that it can hardly play any games.

I'm getting my LG 34UM94 (not the 95, thats old, had issues, only 1 year warranty) - It's an awesome UltraWide 34" 3440 x 1440p screen with 3 year warranty. As a bonus it has two Thunderbolt 2 ports, 2 HDMI, 1 Display port, three USB3 and is only 30% harder to run than a standard 27" 1440p screen.

This should last me years to come....

Well, see that's exactly why you do want a 5120 x 2880 resolution, so you can game at 2560 x 1440 which the GPU can handle and then scale effortlessly to the display's native resolution. 2D stuff is not an issue at these resolutions, so you can enjoy super sharp text and UI elements with no aliasing at any scaling factor when you're not gaming.

Dell's new 5K display is confirmed to use multi transport - it basically claims to be two monitors, each of which can work fine over a single DisplayPort link. I think Dell even specifies that you have to use two DisplayPort cables to run it at full resolution. Apple could easily do that.

Or, what I would think would be interesting: Use Thunderbolt's PCI Express connection, and put a GPU in the display. Then you only need the single Thunderbolt cable. If the GPU in the display is better than what's in your computer (MacBook Air, for example,) then it uses the display GPU to render. If the GPU is worse (Mac Pro, for example,) then it just transfers the framebuffer compressed, doing the rendering on the system GPU. (Or, for the Mac Pro, give you the option of using the display GPU for display rendering, allowing BOTH system GPUs to do GPU compute!)

You paid for a Mac Pro in 5 days meaning you make at least $150K/year. So 16 years of holding that stock would have been worth $400K vs working for 16 years (at your current minimum pay rate anyways) would be $2.4M. But I suspect that you probably didn't get the cheapest Mac Pro, which means your pay is somewhere above that (but again, 16 years worth of promotions, so... I'll just stick with that number).

Certainly wasn't paid near that in 1998 :D And I didn't earn anywhere near that over the years it was usable.

I had a single well paid job that paid for it in 5 days. Doesn't mean I get that sort of money every job. I had to buy a faster machine to complete the job.

Also to be fair I am not talking profit... just saying that it was covered
6 core - D700 - 64gb Ram - 1tb drive by the way.

The point is that it's a workhorse and a tool. People get so upset about the cost of workstations... and say they could build one for cheaper etc... but no one suggest that a Van driver is an idiot for paying 25K+ for his work van or say 'well i could build a kit one for cheaper'

I think what they mean is: since Apple (unlike Dell) is under no obligation to make the display support anything other than a Mac with Thunderbolt 2, they could potentially use the full bandwidth of TB2 to get the data from the Mac to the display, without being constrained by Thunderbolt's DisplayPort implementation.

I say potentially - no idea whether it could be done easily with current GPUs.

However, if screens *are* going to get this large, there's probably an opportunity for Apple to do some outside-of-the-box thinking, like compressing the video signal, adaptive frame rates, moving some of the GPU functions to the monitor (e.g. the standard video codecs) etc.

My money is still on a smaller iMac/TBD using a 4k UHD screen to pixel-double the current 21" iMac.

Thunderbolt 2 can only transport a single DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2 main link (17.28 Gbit/s of DisplayPort packets), and 5120 x 2880 @ 24 bpp, 60 Hz requires more than 22.52 Gbit/s anyway.

Apple or other OEMs could use this panel in an all-in-one design, such as a Retina iMac, without much of a problem by simply using multiple eDP outputs from the GPU though.