Apple Cinema Display

» see apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i saw a Cinema Display in person was in a small graphic-design studio in Ankara around 2005, sitting next to a Power Mac G5 that the owner had paid more for than a year of my rent at the time. The monitor was a 23-inch aluminum panel with the thin bezel and the off-white Apple cable, and it was the most expensive single object in the room. The studio used it for print layout work. Nobody else i knew owned one. The Cinema Display was a piece of professional equipment in turkey in that period, not a consumer purchase.

Apple shipped the original Cinema Display on September 1 1999, a 22-inch polycarbonate widescreen panel that cost 3999 dollars and required a graphics card with the ADC connector to run. It was the companion display to the Power Mac G4 and the screen the company put behind every Steve Jobs keynote image of the era. The aluminum redesign in 2004 introduced the 20, 23, and 30-inch sizes, with the 30-inch HD model running 2560x1600 and demanding a dual-link DVI card to drive. The 30-inch was, for several years, the largest desktop display you could buy from any manufacturer.

the line moved to LED backlighting in 2008 with a 24-inch glossy unibody design that matched the new aluminum MacBook generation, and to a final 27-inch LED model in 2010 with a built-in iSight camera, three USB ports, and a MagSafe charging cable for laptops. The 27-inch was the last product to carry the Cinema Display name. Apple discontinued it on july 20 2011 when the Thunderbolt Display was announced, keeping the same physical panel but swapping the I/O for a single Thunderbolt cable.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the Cinema Display was Apple's argument that a monitor was a design object. The polycarbonate model in 1999 came out at a time when external displays still mostly looked like office equipment, CRT towers in beige or gray plastic, designed to disappear into a cubicle. Apple positioned the Cinema Display the opposite way: it was supposed to be visible, expensive, and obviously not the same kind of object as the Dells and ViewSonics that sat on the next desk. The price held the line. The cheapest Cinema Display through most of the 2000s cost more than the Mac mini it might be attached to.

~ the long tail ~

the Thunderbolt Display continued the panel from 2011 to june 2016 and then went off sale with no replacement product announced. For six years, from mid-2016 to march 2022, Apple sold no standalone monitor at all. The company pointed buyers to the LG UltraFine line it had co-designed for the MacBook Pro transition, which most reviewers found visually inferior to anything Apple had previously shipped under its own brand. The Studio Display in 2022 finally restarted the consumer-monitor product line, twelve and a half years after the Cinema Display retired and six years after the broader category went dark inside Apple. The Cinema Display name itself has not returned.

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