Reviews for Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch)

Don't waste your money on the 27 inch Thunderbolt display, buy the 27 inch standard display. Why? The Thunderbolt display doesn't work very long. Display #1 (serial #C02KH3EGF2GC) failed within 24 hours. Problem: display went to sleep and never woke up. Returned to Apple store. Display #2 (serial # C02KH4DJF2GC) worked for 3 weeks and failed! Problem: display went to sleep and only would wake up if you unplugged the thunderbolt cable and plugged it back in. And then you couldn't adjust brightness or have any functioning display ports. Display #3 (serial #C02KF2W5F2GC) is currently working for an hour. If it fails, I am going back to the old standard 27 inch display. I have one working in another room perfectly for 3 years now. I am not the only one this has happened to. Read other posts. At first I thought I was just unlucky and got a lemon. I know better now. Apple has issues with this display.

The rumors are true. Thunderbolt is not ready for professional use.

We have 4 of them and once they're on and fully connected, they're fine. But disconnect from them or sleep and it's a great mystery what will work when you come back.

When I bring my laptop into work, I set aside 10-30 minutes for start-up shuffle - figuring out which arrangement will allow me to use two monitors and a USB3 hub w/ my MBP. My displays always forget their arrangement. USB is prone to fail or not recognize the keyboard and/or mouse. Often one display works but not the other, thereby requiring 3 or 4 restarts to finally kick both in. Once we even had a display that simply refused to start for a full day - but then worked fine the next.

Apple's current hardware is really advanced, but prone to amateurish quality control.

Initially, the negative reviews posted gave me pause before I purchased Thunderbolt.
Spoke to the Apple sales people several times about the posted complaints plus
they assured me about the return policy.

Purchased the monitor and it performs great. The color is amazing. I use it everyday.
I have so much more real estate to work with.

Fantastic job Apple.

Purchased to match my 2012 Mac Mini. Works great but need to get use to the smaller font with this high resolution monitor. Also, the ethernet port on the display was labeled incorrectly when hooked up to my router. Had to delete and rename to "display ethernet port" and all is now correct. I like having the hub on the back of the monitor to hook up my firewire 800 Time Machnine hard drive and another USB hub.

I too have had a thunderbolt 27″ fail, in fact two of them. The first one was less than 60 days old. Smack dab in the middle it had subpixels fail with a line running vertically and horizontally and everything below the horizontal line was flickering really bad. Made an appointment with the gunnies bar and ended up with an exchange for a band new unit. I felt really good about how well they handled it. However, in less than one week the second monitor from the exchange died! This time no video, however, the display sound, ethernet, and other ports still worked. Again, made an appointment with genius bar. This time they didn’t even remove the monitor form the box to look at it. They just took my word and brought back another brand new monitor. I’m now on my second day on the third monitor and continuously have my fingers crossed. Yes, apple support was excellent and kodos to my local genus bar, but the reality is I’d just would like a monitor that works!

The Thunderbolt Display looks gorgeous, but don't let the looks deceive you this: this monitor is actually a steaming pile of garbage. I've gone through three in less than a month. The first was shipped with a giant crack in the glass panel. The next two have constantly flickered when plugged into my 13" MacBook Pro, and sometimes shut off completely until I plug them back in. Save yourself some time and money and just buy a cheaper display from another manufacturer.

I don't know what's going on with Apple, but I've been a Mac user for 20 years, and I've noticed a significant decline in the quality of their hardware over the past five years or so.

...but this product joins the trunk full of apple products I'm accumulating that needed repair barely 1 month out of warranty. In any case, the cable assembly that splits into a TB connector and power supply is defective. A few weeks ago the display went dim. Then the monitor went semi-comatose: Speakers worked but not the screen. So I tried using a separate tb cable to the open port on the back. That brought the screen back to life. So now I have to wait 3 days for an appointment at the local 'genius' bar (sounds so silly to say that, doesn't it?) and then a likely $150 repair bill.

I've had two of these monitors completely fail on me now. One was a bad LCD panel ($962 to fix) and 6 weeks past the warranty period. Thanks good ness for extended warranties with the credit card company I purchased it with. The second just failed today. A loud pop and the screen is dead. Not the computer as I have another monitor and tested the computer.

Apple's quality control has gone down so much over the last year or so. Sure it si great while it works, but 2 monitors in 2 years is a pretty lousy track record.

Avoid it!

Just took delivery of my new display, purchased from a store here in New Zealand. Perhaps a minor issue, but my son bought one a couple of months back (different store, same city) and the picture within the display featured on the box is quite different - both "Milky Way" images but one is markedly different from the other.

That apart, one annoyance is that, using it as I do with my MacBook Pro, any time the monitor goes into sleep mode I have to unplug the monitor from the MB and re-connect. I use bluetooth keyboard and mouse and neither is able to shake the display from its slumber. Any way to overcome this?

I'm a scientific programmer working in the field of astronomy. I program all day long and the Thunderbolt display is absolutely wonderful. It is wide, crisp, and has exceptional contrast. It syncs perfectly whenever I remove and reattach to my MacBook Pro, never any hassles. I also have an older Cinema display for my home system. It is good also, but it has lower contrast and runs quite a lot warmer than the Thunderbolt. Three cheers for Apple on this one.