Apple Thunderbolt Display review

With Intel’s Thunderbolt technology gracing the latest slew of MacBooks and Mac minis, Apple has now revealed the perfect monitor to match. By taking the body of the 27in LED Cinema Display and adding Intel’s lightning-quick connectivity to the mix, Apple’s multitalented Thunderbolt Display is more than just a 27in monitor. It doubles as a slick docking station, adding 2.1 speakers and throwing in an HD webcam for good measure.

At a glance, the Thunderbolt Display is identical to the standard LED Cinema Display. They share the same stunning good looks – that hefty aluminium figure looks and feels like it’s worth every penny of the £899 asking price. And both have the same LCD panel at their core, an LED-backlit, 2,560 x 1,440 IPS unit.

The integrated set of 2.1 speakers still carry a crisp, weighty tune, and the integrated webcam receives a welcome upgrade, leaping from 640 x 480 to a crisp 1,280 x 720.

Functionally, it’s neater than ever. Where the captive cable trailing from the previous LED Cinema Display required separate mini-DisplayPort and USB connections, Intel’s Thunderbolt does it with a single cable. That super-fast connection provides enough bandwidth to carry them all at once.

And the Thunderbolt Display has more than only three USB 2 sockets. At the rear of the monitor, you’ll find three USB 2 sockets, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, and a Thunderbolt port for daisy-chaining high-speed devices, such as hard disk RAID arrays and high-end video capture devices. There’s even a MagSafe connector for charging your MacBook from.

Image quality is superb. There’s no onscreen display, and only brightness is adjustable from within OS X’s display options, but the Thunderbolt Display delivers incredible images straight out of the box. The LED backlighting delivers eye-popping brightness and the IPS panel combines wide viewing angles with vibrant, accurate colour reproduction. The glossy finish is the only low point; we frequently found ourselves cranking up the brightness to compensate in our bright, sunny office space.

Under more favourable conditions, the quality of the IPS panel at the heart of the Thunderbolt Display shines through, and testing with our X-Rite colorimeter saw the monitor deliver a superb technical performance.

The maximum brightness of 404cd/m2 wasn’t quite as bright as that of the LED Cinema Display – that managed 421cd/m2 – but otherwise the results were improved across the board. Colour temperature measured at an almost perfect 6548K – the ideal is 6500K – and gamma was only slightly higher than the ideal of 2.2 at 2.38. An average Delta E (or colour difference) of only 1.8 is exemplary, and marks a notable improvement on that of the LED Cinema Display, which managed an average of 2.7 (a lower number is better). With most people struggling to see colour differences of less than 3 to 4 Delta E, the Thunderbolt Display is easily accurate enough for colour-critical work.

However, despite excellent image quality and typically eye-catching design, some basic practicalities are lacking. The stand, for example, might look lovely, but it only tilts back and forth – most other monitors at this price are height adjustable, and while you could wedge a pile of old magazines underneath, that’s not exactly ideal.

And then there’s the limitation of the single Thunderbolt video input. This isn’t backward compatible with the mini-DisplayPort standard it so closely resembles, so it’s impossible to connect PCs or previous-generation Macs. If you’re hoping to connect something other than a brand new Thunderbolt-equipped Mac, you’ll either need to consider Apple’s non-Thunderbolt LED Cinema Display or another monitor entirely.

Yet, despite the quirks and uncompromising limitations, Apple’s Thunderbolt Display remains highly desirable. Professionals may find that a more adjustable, flexible display, and one with a matte screen finish, such as Dell’s UltraSharp U2711H or Eizo’s FlexScan SX2762W, makes a more practical purchase, but, for anyone who can afford it, the Thunderbolt Display will doubtless strike just the right balance.

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