Yeah, it’s a great hack, but in my testing, the tradeoffs weren’t worth it.
1 Like
No plans for. I wonder how far ahead their roadmap is, because eventually the standard will be 27 inches. At the moment the studio display is just too expensive unless you want to do high quality photographic work. I wonder if the rationale is that someone will get a Mac Studio and a Samsung or other monitor, because if Apple bought the panels and assembled them they wouldn’t make money.
My preference for photographic work has been monitors with a 16:10 aspect ratio. Eizo makes a wide gamut 16:10 monitor, and it works for me. It limits me to 24", but that’s a good fit for my small workspaces and I can connect it to a KVM easily.
1 Like
What Eizo model is that? I have similar desk space restrictions.
Thanks.
EIZO ColorEdge CS2400S 24.1" Monitor
The one I have is the previous model.
1 Like
Apple says all kinds of things about what they won’t do. Right up until the moment they decide to do it.
Such statements are, at best, a statement for the next year or so. Don’t assume it is something that will be forever binding.
3 Likes
That’s actually a very good point, and one we should all keep in mind. Just because Apple says they’re not doing something right now doesn’t mean they don’t plan to ever do it. Sometimes, they say they’re not planning something just to keep the press from hounding them about it. They also like to keep upcoming products quiet until they’re ready to actually officially announce an available date, because that helps keep them from having to break promises about dates.
This is very true. But they also rarely comment on future products. I agree that they absolutely could still release a bigger iMac in the future. But I think it’s clear that anyone who is holding off upgrading because they think a larger iMac is around the corner should stop waiting. Given the definitiveness of Apples statement I’d say it’s more of a statement for at least the next 2–3+ years. The chance of a larger iMac a year from now is effectively 0%.
2 Likes
A TidBITS reader who doesn’t have a TidBITS Talk account, Steve Setzer, shared this for me to post:
In comments to “Apple Confirms No More 27-inch iMacs” Jonathan Duke is buying the LG UltraFine 5K 27 inch monitor. Great monitor; we had a ton of them at my last company and one’s on my wife’s desk now. I do have one comment that might be helpful to the community.
It’s perfect when paired with a desktop. With a MacBook of any kind, it’s super-convenient to use a single Thunderbolt cable for power and display. But, we had several monitor failures and after some Internet research I concluded that the use of power and display over the single wire heated things up inside the monitor case and occasionally caused failures of nearby components.
The solution for my wife was a Thunderbolt dock. She still gets the power and display through one cable, but that cable goes to an OWC dock that while expensive for a dock was much cheaper than the monitor. I think it’s probably better designed thermally too.
In this setup, the monitor is only sending data to the dock so its internals stay cool. The dock’s power supply powers the laptop.
If Jonathan is connecting to a desktop Mac, he’s golden already. If he’s connecting those two monitors to a MacBook of some kind, though, I’d suggest he spring for a dock that can handle two Thunderbolt video cables plus the power. Money well spent.
4 Likes
If you connect an Apple power brick (perhaps via MagSafe) at the same time as a direct TB link to the display, which will try to power the laptop?
Can you disable the display’s power delivery to make sure the laptop’s power brick is doing all the charging?
I recently purchased this display.
Not sure what this question is asking. There is no independent power supply for the monitor, so it gets its power from the TB connection. Are you asking if a TB connection to an unplugged laptop (on battery) vs a laptop connected to the power brick has any effect on the monitor heating?
In my case the TB is attached to a mini so I can’t test this, but I have not seen any heating issues on the monitor in the several weeks I’ve had it.
Jack Clay
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple had a prototype 27 inch or larger, just in case, and that is where the rumours are coming from. The way that Apple works, like most large consumer electronic companies, is they will be doing surveys and focus groups to check likely demand. One of the things they use is discrete choice modelling where you ask people to choose between different configurations. So you might have a 24 inch plus $300 compared to a 27 inch. Do enough of these and you can estimate the price people are prepared to pay for a feature. Then they can compare to the manufacturing cost. Manufacturing costs change and so do consumers, and then they change the products.
I, like many others I think, long wished for the Mythical Mac Mini-tower, aka a headless iMac. In fact, when I replaced my Mac desktop (a PowerMac 8500) with an iMac, it was only because there was no M^3.
When the Mac mini came out was that the MMM we wanted? No, because internally it was to the iMac as the iBook was to the Mac Book Pro. The Mac mini used laptop parts instead of desktop, with mobile processors, slower hard drive, and no discrete graphics accelerator.
Now I think Apple Silicon and SSDs has made that moot. All the Apple Silicon chips have GPU cores, there’s no discrete graphics on any model, and all the SSDs are fast. Now I think the differentiating factor is number of ports. (And I’m wondering why the Mac Studio is so much larger than the Mac mini.)
So now the problem in building an Apple “desktop” using the Mac mini or Studio is that the only Apple displays are very expensive; I’m thinking they’re much more than you would get with a 27" iMac.
1 Like
Heat sink & thermal envelope.
1 Like
Which display are you talking about? I just went to LG’s web site and downloaded the user’s manual for the 27" UltraFine Display for Mac (27MD5KL). It most definitely has an AC power connector. See the picture on page 8 and the setup instructions on page 13.
The Thunderbolt power delivery is from the display to an attached computer.
(cue Homer Simpson voice)
Mmmmm…conjoint analysis!
1 Like
Yes - as I indicated above, my LG monitor has its own power supply and its USB-c port supplies power for the Macbook Air as well as providing the video connection. I also found that I can plug an external drive into the USB3 port on the monitor and it mounts on the Macbook. One USC-c cable does it all!
@ace Adam, please thank Steve for his comments. I found them very useful to help me plan a better deployment.
While the monitor does have a 3 year warranty, having to swap it out due to a failure is something we all want to avoid. Is the Apple premium for a presumably better engineered display worth it? I’m not sure.
I am deploying some OWC Thunderbolt 4 hubs with the laptops to get a single-cable connection when connecting multiple displays, so will note that need for the LG.
The moment I attach my Apple 96 W power supply over MagSafe, my 14" MBP claims it’s charging from that, regardless of the fact that it was just before powered through the 60 W passthrough of my TB4 hub. The order by which TB4 hub and MagSafe are connected does not matter either — MagSafe always takes precedent when it comes to charging. In fact, this is even true when I connect the MagSafe cable to a lower-wattage USB-C power supply.
2 Likes