Apple Thunderbolt Display
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Iteration is something Apple is good at. Its 24-inch Cinema Display was good, but it appealed to an extremely small minority of users. In 2010 Apple released a new version with an improved screen and by that time there were many more Mini DisplayPort-compatible Macs in the wild, thus widening its appeal.
With its Thunderbolt Display, Apple adds a superfast connection, as well as some other functionality, but does the very nature of the monitor's Thunderbolt-based origin ultimately hold it back from pleasing more than just Mac users?
Design and features
The Apple Thunderbolt Display shares the same basic design as the (non-Thunderbolt) Cinema Display released in 2010. Thankfully, the gorgeous 27-inch IPS screen with its 2,560x1,440-pixel resolution made the transition with no degradation in quality. Aesthetically, the chassis design is almost exactly the same as before, and along with the new features, virtually everything you got with the Cinema Display, you get in the Thunderbolt Display. Well, almost, but we'll get to that later.
The monitor's chassis, including the back of the monitor and its foot stand, has the same smooth aluminum gray finish as the Cinema Display, and just as the Cinema Display did, it includes an ambient light sensor, a built-in camera and microphone, built-in 2.1 speakers, and three USB 2.0 ports located on the lower back left.
The panel is 2.25 inches in full depth and about 25.6 inches wide. The bezel, flush with the screen, is 1.1 inches wide on the right and left sides, and the distance from the bottom of the bezel to the desktop is 3.6 inches. The foot stand is 7.4 inches wide and 8.2 inches deep, and the monitor hardly moved when we knocked it from the sides. This is in part thanks to the flatness and width of the foot stand, but also to the display's heavy 24-pound weight.
So what are the differences? To start with, the Thunderbolt Display adds a Gigabit Ethernet port, a FireWire port, and, wait for it...a Thunderbolt connection.
However (and this is the "well, almost" referred to earlier), because there's currently no Thunderbolt support for PCs, the display will not work with them. But, thankfully, it will work with Macs running Windows through Boot Camp. Note that the Thunderbolt Display doesn't support hot-swapping to a Mac running Windows in Boot Camp. The computer must be restarted already connected to the display to work properly. Also, according to Apple there's no support for non-Thunderbolt-enabled Macs. Once we've gotten our hands on an older Mac, we'll confirm this.
The display includes a 20-degree back tilt as its sole ergonomic option, with no screen-height adjustment, pivoting, or swivel offered. Calibration options in OS X include brightness, color temperature, gamma, and contrast controls. The interface for the latter can only be accessed by turning on expert mode from the Display Calibrator Assistant.
As an interesting and welcome bonus for MacBook Air owners, plugging the display into an Ethernet connection allows the Air to take advantage of full wired Ethernet speeds as opposed to being limited to Wi-Fi.