Apple Classics
Cinema HD Display revisited
This was – and remains – the biggest display Apple has ever made. We wish they’d do something
similar at 4K
We all assumed (by which I mean, ‘hoped so much that we actually managed to convince ourselves it would happen’) that when the new Mac Pro was finally made available at the end of 2013, Apple would quietly introduce a new display – one that ran at 4K resolution (four times the pixels of a Full HD display) to complement the Mac Pro’s native support of 4K video streams. It didn’t. Sigh.
Instead, then, let’s turn nostalgically to the 30-inch Cinema HD Display, the biggest monitor Apple has ever made. It was introduced in 2004, alongside a 20- and 23-inch model, and cost £2,549 – a little less than the cost of two entry-level Power Mac G5s of the same era.
It had the same horizontal resolution as the modern 27-inch iMacs, but because it was taller (a 16:10 aspect ratio screen compared to the iMac’s 16:9) it had more pixels – 2560 x 1600 to the iMac’s 2560 x 1440. For a long time it was the highest resolution display Apple had ever made. It’s only with the 15-inch Retina display on the MacBook Pros that Apple has bettered it in pixel count. Indeed, it was so high-res it needed the then-rare dual-link DVI connection; single-link connections max out at 1920 x 1200 in practical terms.
Quite apart from the pixel resolution, though, was the sheer size of the thing. You might think a 27-inch iMac dominates a desk, but you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve sat in front of a 30-inch monster. Sure, by modern standards, the colours are washed out. Sure, it looks comically chubby next to the 5mm thick edge of the current iMacs. And sure, the pixel density is almost embarrassingly coarse to eyes now accustomed to Retina displays. But my god, it was a belter at the time, and you still can’t beat it for sheer impact!