thunderbolt display lcd panel factory

Grade A in Excellent Working Condition, Fully Tested and 100% Functional 90 Day Hardware Warranty Buy with Confidence - Coretek is a Microsoft Registered Refurbisher and Global Seller The Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-Inch) is intended to be the "ultimate docking station" for a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac notebook (it is not compatible with earlier Macs). Thunderbolt makes it possible to connect one cable and use this display"s built-in Face

Time HD camera, mic, 2.1 speakers (49 watts), three USB 2.0 ports, single Firewire "800" port, single Gigabit Ethernet port, and Thunderbolt port. In addition to the built-in Thunderbolt cable, the display also has a built-in Mag

Book Pro. With the exception of connectivity, this display is similar to the LED Cinema Display (27-Inch) that preceded it, and likewise uses the same sleek aluminum case and features a 27-inch glossy LED-backlit TFT active-matrix LCD display with IPS technology and an optimum resolution of 2560x1440. It has a 178 degree horizontal and vertical viewing angle, a "typical" brightness of 375 cd/m2, contrast ratio of 1000:1, and a 12 ms response time. Expand All Details | Contract All

Details: This is a 27-inch glossy LED-backlit TFT active-matrix LCD with IPS technology and a viewable area of 27-inches. The optimum resolution is 2560x1440. It has a 178 degree horizontal and vertical viewing angle, a "typical" brightness of 375 cd/m2, contrast ratio of 1000:1, and a 12 ms response time.

Details: Three powered USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire 800 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port (hub), and one Thunderbolt port as well as a built-in Thunderbolt cable and a built-in Mag

The struggling Apple partner was first said to be considering a sale of the plant in 2019 in an effort to pay back its debts to Apple, which funded the construction of the facility with a $1.5 billion "prepayment" to the display maker.

Now, Nikkei reports that Japan Display plans to finalize the deal to sell the factory and the land it occupies to Sharp, a subsidiary of Apple supplier Foxconn. The sale is estimated to be worth about 40 billion yen (about $375 million).

The Hakusan plant, located in the Ishikawa Prefecture of Japan, is equipped to produce LCD smartphone displays. It has been left idle since July 2019, a casualty of Japan Display"s reported lack of preparation for the iPhone"s shift to OLED.

In March, Japan Display was said to have sold about $200 million worth of LCD manufacturing equipment from the facility to a customer believed to be Apple. Nikkei"s report on Thursday suggests that Japan Display has sold a total of $281 million worth of equipment to that customer.

Sharp, for its part, plans to use the facility to consolidate its production of LCD panels for Apple iPhone while renting the manufacturing equipment from Apple. A Sharp facility in Kameyama, Japan, will reportedly shift to producing panels for customers in areas such as automotive or medical equipment. The facility can produce up to 7 million display panels per month.

Japan Display originally planned to sell the plant, that Apple assisted build by pre-funding it for 170 billion yen, by the end of March, but the global coronavirus pandemic snarled negotiations.

In total, the sale of the factory to Sharp and equipment to the unnamed customer could net Japan Display about 70 billion yen. As of March 2020, Japan Display was said to still owe about $800 million to Apple.

As the sequel to Apple’s LED Cinema Display, the Apple Thunderbolt Display (Orig. $999, now on Ebay for much less) was originally introduced in July 2011, and had not changed until it was discontinued in June 2016. Measuring 27″ on the diagonal, the metal and glass Thunderbolt Display uses the same 2560×1440 screen found in the original 27″ iMac and the LED Cinema Display, with a chassis thickness somewhere between the last two iMac generations. Three speakers are inside the frame for 2.1-channel audio, along with a basic FaceTime HD camera and a microphone.

The display is different because it has a Thunderbolt connector, which makes a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, or Mac Pro easy to hook up. After plugging the monitor into a wall outlet, you connect your Mac via the Thunderbolt cable to gain access to three powered USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 800 port, a Thunderbolt port, and an Ethernet port. There’s also a MagSafe plug to supply up to 85W of power to a MacBook, as well as a packed-in MagSafe 2 adapter for newer MacBooks. Thunderbolt is required for the video connection; no other video standard is supported.

The Thunderbolt Display has not been updated for roughly four years, and shows its age in physical thickness, non-Retina display resolution, the age of its ports, and pricing. It’s very hard to recommend right now, and we’d expect Apple to release a new version in the not-too-distant future.

Apple unveiled the all-new Thunderbolt Display, a 27-inch standalone monitor priced at $999, 10 years ago this week. It was the first display to use the new Thunderbolt connection and the last Apple monitor to ship for less than $4,999.

But $999 might as well be $5,000 when you’re a freshman in college. I never had the opportunity to actually review Apple’s last consumer display, but based on what we knew then, this is the review I could have written at the time (followed by some classic video reviews):

With WWDC 2021 coming up on Monday, it’s been two years since Apple announced the Pro Display XDR — an amazing but expensive external monitor aimed at professional users who need things like high resolution, extreme brightness, and wide color gamut. But what about regular Mac users? They also deserve to have a great external monitor, and Apple should think about this.

Earlier today, Apple silently pushed shipping times for the LG UltraFine 5K display back to 5 to 6 weeks. The move came following our report last week highlighting problems using the display with 2 feet of wireless routers due to poor shielding.

If you’ve been holding out for a new standalone desktop display from Apple, you’re either going to take news of the Thunderbolt Display being discontinued as a sign of good things to come, or as a cue to finally purchase a new 4K or 5K display from someone else. For most, especially considering Apple itself is recommending you purchase a third-party display, the latter option is going to be the more likely.

While Apple didn’t recommend any specific third-party alternatives during its discontinuation announcement of the Thunderbolt display last week, we’ve done the work for you and put together our top picks for the best 4K & 5K displays for Mac available to buy right now.

Apple officially announced yesterday that its Thunderbolt Display is dead. The monitor was never updated to match the much thinner design of the current iMacs, it featured a MagSafe 1 connector and required a MagSafe 2 adapter, and its resolution was far inferior to Retina iMacs so it was no surprise to see it finally discontinued.

Apple typically replaces a discontinued product with a newer version, though, so yesterday’s move could be interpreted as a sign that the company is fully exiting the external display business. Not so fast, says one voice however…

The current $999 (!) Thunderbolt Display is showing its age to put it mildly, now significantly overshadowed by Retina MacBooks and iMacs in terms of screen resolution and quality. Reaffirming earlier reports, we have heard that stock of the Thunderbolt Display at Apple Stores is quickly running out with no indications of more units on the way to replenish availability. This is often a good indicator that a refresh is imminent. We are led to believe that WWDC will be very light on new hardware. However, given the opportunity for cheers in the audience, perhaps Apple could announce the new display at the keynote with a release pencilled in for later in the year.

Independently, we have heard some rumblings about what the new display might offer. Finally bringing it up to speed with its Retina display Mac cousins, the new ‘Thunderbolt Display’ will likely feature a 5K resolution display 5120×2880 pixels. Moreover, sources indicate that Apple will take the display in a surprising direction, specifically suggesting that Apple plans to integrate a dedicated external GPU into the display itself …

It’s been true for way too long now that Apple’s Thunderbolt Display is due for a comprehensive upgrade. Apple’s $999 27-inch display has a dated design and has much lower resolution than the Retina 5K iMac for $800 more. For those reasons and more, it’s been on everyone’s Do Not Buy list for quite some time, but that may be about to change.

There are a few products in need of updates that aren’t currently being planned for the event, with new MacBooks the most obvious of candidates, but some aging products like Mac Pro, the Thunderbolt Display, AirPort products, wireless EarPods, and more also due for updates. Here’s everything Apple needs to update, but likely won’t announce at its event on Monday:

We’ve been poring over Apple’s change to the 8.4mm by 2.6mm USB Type C standard since we got tipped the design of the new MacBook late last year. It is a big change for Apple and puts the future of longstanding technologies like Thunderbolt and MagSafe into questionable status.  Even Lightning seems a whole lot more vulnerable when an adapter that is marginally bigger, but has the whole industry behind it, shows up in Apple’s future flagship laptop.

Despite USB 3.0’s growing popularity with consumers, Thunderbolt remains a viable alternative for professional users, particularly video makers willing to pay a premium for guaranteed high speeds. Over the past year, several Thunderbolt 2 hubs have come to market — boxes with one Thunderbolt 2 connection to a computer, one for a Thunderbolt accessory, and multiple ports to connect USB, audio, video, and Ethernet accessories. The idea: keep all of your gear hooked up to the hub, then use a single cable to connect it all to your Mac.

Known for large, heavy, professional-grade Mac accessories, CalDigit has just released Belkin’s $300 Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock HD and Elgato’s $230 Thunderbolt 2 Dock (review) into a smaller, denser-feeling enclosure, at a lower MSRP — sort of. In reality, Thunderbolt Station 2 has some very specific benefits and one limitation that place it on par with its competitors, making the choice between them a more personal decision…

A security researcher speaking at the Chaos Computer Congress in Hamburg demonstrated a hack that rewrites an Intel Mac’s firmware using a Thunderbolt device with attack code in an option ROM. Known as Thunderstrike, the proof of concept presented by Trammel Hudson infects the Apple Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) in a way he claims cannot be detected, nor removed by reinstalling OS X.

Apple has already implemented an intended fix in the latest Mac mini and iMac with Retina display, which Hudson says will soon be available for other Macs, but appears at this stage to provide only partial protection…  expand full story

LG has just announced that it will formally launch the 34UC97,  “the world’s first curved monitor with an extra-wide 21:9 aspect ratio,” at the IFA in Berlin next month. The 34-inch ultra-wide monitor offers a 3440×1440 resolution, and – appealingly for Mac users – supports Thunderbolt 2 …  expand full story

When Apple made a big fuss over the ability of the Mac Pro to support three 4K displays, it signalled that it could only be a matter of time before the company created its own. As I predicted back in October of last year, the company made no attempt to rush this, but we’re now hearing that Apple is close to finishing work on either a 4K Apple Thunderbolt Display, a 4K iMac or both.

There are Mac accessories that are exciting or fun, and others that are boring but useful. The Elgato Thunderbolt Dock most definitely falls into the latter category.

As regular readers will know, I’m of the view that wires are evil. Anything that can be wireless should be wireless, and any wires that are unavoidable should be hidden from sight. This is particularly easy if you have an Apple Thunderbolt Display, of course, since all you need in the way of wires from a MacBook is power and Thunderbolt: everything else can be plugged into the back of the monitor.

But if you share my aversion to visible wires and don’t have a Thunderbolt display, or you are frequently connecting and disconnecting your MacBook from a bunch of devices on your desk, the Elgato Thunderbolt Dock may be the answer …

Corning is hoping to turn that around this year with the consumer launch of its Thunderbolt Optical Cables in 10 meter (33 foot), 30 meter (99 foot), and 60 meter (198 foot) sizes. With these lengths, you can put your Thunderbolt hard disk and arrays far away from your desk. If you have a Thunderbolt Display or a Thunderbolt dock, you can even move your Mac to the utility closet or basement and really clean up your desk space.

When Apple started offering a Sharp 4K display in its European online Apple Store, then withdrew it shortly afterwards, some speculated that this might mean an Apple 4K display is about to be launched.

It’s possible, of course, but I strongly suspect not. As I argued in October, the launch of the Mac Pro would have been the obvious point at which to announce an Apple 4K display – and current MacBook Pros can’t drive 4K displays at decent frame-rates, so I can’t see Apple launching a display that would leave the bulk of Mac owners disappointed.

The far more likely explanation is that Apple plans to sell the Sharp displays alongside the Mac Pro once it launches – as I suggested it might in that same opinion piece in October. The displays were inadvertently made live on the store before the Pro was launched, and have been removed until the Pro is available …  expand full story

Having recently speculated on what Apple might have planned in the way of 4K displays, I thought I’d build on that to think about what it might have in store on the television front.

If you didn’t read my 4K piece, the tl;dr version is I think Apple will launch a 4K Thunderbolt Display in about a year’s time, once it has a new generation of MacBook Pro models able to drive one (or preferably two) at a decent frame-rate.

The question then is: what form might the long-rumored Apple Television take? After all, plug an upgraded Apple TV box into an Apple 4K display and you’d have an Apple Television right there. Why would we need anything more … ?  expand full story

There was one notable omission from Apple’s recent flurry of new product announcements: a 4K display. It will launch one in time, of course – and I’ll come to that shortly. But in the meantime, there’s the question of how it demonstrates one of the key capabilities of the new Mac Pro.

Sure, they could hook it up to multiple Thunderbolt Displays, but that’s not the same: Apple made a point when launching the machine of pointing out that it could drive three simultaneous 4K displays. That’s a capability you’d imagine it would want to at least show off in-store, and perhaps even offer for sale …

I’m a huge fan of Thunderbolt. A single wire carrying both DisplayPort and high-speed PCIe data is an incredibly elegant approach to minimising cable clutter even if you don’t need the blistering speed, especially when you can use an Apple Thunderbolt Display as a hub for your USB devices.

I also admire clever tech. The reason you can daisy-chain up to six separate devices is because Thunderbolt automatically multiplexes and de-multiplexes the signals as needed. Thunderbolt 2 takes this approach one step further, combining two 10Gbit/s channels into a single 20Gbit/s connection, with the the Thunderbolt controller again doing all the work. It’s impressive stuff.

Just Mobile is known for making accessories built from high quality materials, like aluminum, that nicely match the designs of Apple’s recent hardware products. However, some of their products seemed to have focused on function over form, rather than a mix of both. However, over the past few weeks, I have been using their AluDisc accessory for the Apple Thunderbolt Display, LED Cinema Display, and iMac, and I have found the accessory to be a nice, helpful addition to any workspace with those large Apple screens.

The AluDisc is a high-quality, seemingly well-built pedestal that allows you to easily and quickly rotate your display. During my daily workflow, I need to consistently pull USB and Thunderbolt cables out and in of the back of my Thunderbolt Display. Usually, to accomplish this task, I need to manually rotate my display. This is not a truly complex task, but the AluDisc actually makes this process extremely quick and easy. The disc can spins 360 degrees, making it simple to rotate my display.

With all of the extra connectivity there is to test with the Thunderbolt Display we can"t forget the actual panel testing. Thankfully this part is pretty simple, the display characteristics are near identical to the 27-inch LED Cinema Display we reviewed last year.

We report two main quality metrics in our display reviews: color accuracy (Delta-E) and color gamut. Color gamut refers to the range of colors the display is able to represent with respect to some color space. In this case, our reference is the AdobeRGB 1998 color space, which is larger than the sRGB color space. So our percentages are reported with respect to this number, and larger is generally better.

Color accuracy (Delta E) refers to the display’s ability to display the correct color requested by the GPU and OS. The difference between the color represented by the display, and the color requested by the GPU is our Delta-E, and lower is better here. In practice, a Delta E under 1.0 is perfect - the chromatic sensitivity of the human eye is not great enough to distinguish a difference. Moving up, a Delta E of 2.0 or less is generally considered fit for use in a professional imaging environment - it isn’t perfect, but it’s hard to gauge the difference. Finally, Delta E of 4.0 and above is considered visible with the human eye. Of course, the big consideration here is frame of reference; unless you have another monitor or some print samples (color checker card) to compare your display with, you probably won’t notice. That is, until you print or view media on another monitor. Then the difference will no doubt be apparent.

As I mentioned in our earlier reviews, we’ve updated our display test bench. We’ve deprecated the Monaco Optix XR Pro colorimeter in favor of an Xrite i1D2 since there are no longer up-to-date drivers for modern platforms.

For these tests, we calibrate the display and try to obtain the best Delta-E we can get at 200 nits of brightness for normal use. We target 6500K and a gamma of 2.2, but sometimes the best performance lies at native temperature and another gamma, so we try to find what the absolute best performance could be. We also take an uncalibrated measurement to show performance out of the box using either the manufacturer supplied color profile, or a generic one with no LUT data. For all of these, dynamic contrast is disabled.

Uncalibrated performance remains fairly similar to last year"s LED Cinema Display, however once calibrated the Thunderbolt Display is spot on with its predecessor:

As we mentioned earlier, a sub 2.0 delta E is good enough for professional use. Although not perfect the Thunderbolt Display falls within that range for sure.

We measured slightly lower color gamut on the Thunderbolt Display than the original LED Cinema Display, however the result was much closer to the 2011 27-inch iMac. I couldn"t visibly tell any differences and Apple indicates that color gamut shouldn"t have changed, so it"s quite possible that the differences here are due to our colorimeter and not the panel.

Now for color consistency, we take our best calibration profile from the very center at 200 nits and test color accuracy at 9 different places around the LCD display in an evenly distributed grid. We’ve shown before that calibration is localized across the display, partly due to the brightness not being uniform, partly due to the discrete nature of the display itself.

The Thunderbolt Display was fairly uniform across its surface, something we noticed in reviewing the 27-inch LED Cinema Display last year. Uniformity is actually better on this panel than the one we reviewed last year, although in both cases I couldn"t really tell any differences.

Peak brightness appears down slightly, but so are the black levels which result in a slightly better contrast ratio. Apple is also calibrating these things at the factory now so white points are now set at around 6300K vs. 7100K on the original 27-inch LED Cinema Display.

Total tilt adjustment is the ability for the monitor head to move up and down. Tilt adjustment enables a user to change the viewing position of the display, creating a more comfortable view of the screen.

Response time is how long it takes for a display to change the state of pixels, in order to show new content. The less time it takes to respond, the less likely it is to blur fast-changing images.

A nit is a measurement of the light that a display emits, equal to one candela per square meter. Brighter displays ensure a screen"s contents are easy to read, even in sunny conditions.

Bit depth is the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel. The more bits, the more color range a panel displays. An 8-bit panel uses 256 levels per channel and displays 16.7 million colors, while a 10-bit one reaches 1024 and displays 1.07 billion colors.

Contrast ratio is the visual distance between the lightest and the darkest colors that may be reproduced on the display. A high contrast ratio is desired, resulting in richer dark colors and more distinctive color gradation.