Apple Discontinues Thunderbolt Display (macrumors.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has officially told several news sites that it plans to discontinue the Thunderbolt Display, which has been available online and in Apple retail stores since it was first introduced in 2011. "We're discontinuing the Apple Thunderbolt Display. It will be available through Apple.com, Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers while supplies last. There are a number of great third-party options available for Mac users," said an Apple spokesperson. Rumors suggest that Apple will launch a new version of its Thunderbolt monitor later this year, featuring an upgraded 5K resolution and discrete GPU. The new Thunderbolt Display may even launch alongside next-generation Skylake Retina MacBook Pros, which too are rumored to be released later this year. fyngyrz writes: So, bought into the whole Thunderbolt monitor thing from Apple? Might want to collect a few right now, while you still can. It appears that the Thunderbolt monitor is going the way of the analog [headphone] jack over at Apple. Isn't it fun to be part of an unsuccessful experiment?

Comments

Convenience.

[Darinbob]

I sort of wanted one at work. I have a Thunderbolt (2.0) hub, that has thunderbolt in, with thunderbolt, gigabit ethernet, usb 3.0, audio, mini display port, and hdmi out. The hope was that one cable was all I would need to plug in whenever I dock my laptop at work, which has two monitors. Turns out that the only way to get two monitors with fed from one thunderbolt cable is if one monitor takes thunderbolt directly. So while one thunderbolt cable can do one 4K monitor, it can't do two 1920 monitors. Oh well, at least it's only two cables I have to plug in.

Buying Apple is always a gamble

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my ultimate Mac bigot days I managed to keep from getting burned by OpenDoc (by ignoring it as snake oil) and QuickDraw3D (by adopting it very gradually, thereby not losing much when it was suddenly cancelled with no replacement.) A lot of guys dove in and lost whole product lines if not companies.

Apple custom hardware is even less dependable. Don't buy anything you can't afford to have orphaned without notice.

Love Apple all you want, but don't trust 'em. They were never in business to help you, and now they don't even have to care.

Re:Of course

[rworne]

Not the first time this has happened. Back in the PowerPC days, they had an Apple LCD monitor that hooked up to the computer with a single cable. Basically a bastardized DVI cable with an oval connector, USB, and some extra power lines in it.

It was compatible with nothing but Apple stuff, unless you bought an expensive box to convert it into DVI and a wall-plug.

So this isn't the first time we are seeing this.