Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: Thunderbolt Display

  • Don't hold your breath for Apple to release Thunderbolt displays

    Marco Arment explains why there’s no Thunderbolt displays on the horizon.

    Pushing this many pixels requires more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.2 offers, which is what Thunderbolt 2 ports use for outputting video signals. (I wrote about this a few times.) Doing it right will require waiting until DisplayPort 1.3 in Thunderbolt 3 on Broadwell’s successor, Skylake, which isn’t supposed to come out for at least another year — and Intel is even worse at estimating ship dates than I am, so it’s likely to be longer.

    It may be possible to use two Thunderbolt 2 cables to power a 5K display, but only if the GPU could treat each port as its own full-bandwidth DisplayPort 1.2 channel, the sum of which represented one logical display, and had the panel using something like MST to combine the two at the other end. But the only Mac with more than one Thunderbolt bus (not port) is the current Mac Pro, and I can’t see today’s Apple shipping an external display that none of their laptops can use.

    There is no way Apple will launch proper 5K retina Thunderbolt displays, on par with the new retina iMac, anytime soon. I based my predictions on the matter on the same basis.

  • Predictions for Apple's October event

    Predictions for Apple's October event

    There’ll be an Apple event on October 16, and it’ll be livestreamed for all to see. The previous event, announcing the iPhone 6 models and showing off the Apple Watch, was a major fuckup for most viewers, so Apple’ll want to get this one right.

    The tagline, “It’s been way too long”, hints at a new iMac, I think. The fact that Apple’s using the rainbow colors makes me think there’ll be color variations of the new iMac yet again. All speculation of course. I’d also expect a Mac mini, but I don’t think there’ll be anything particularly interesting in terms of design there, just a bump and possibly some minor tweaks.

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