The Pro Display XDR from 18 years ago!

The Weird Way That This Thing Handles Inputs

Around the back where most monitors you would expect to find a mess of cables with this one, we only find one. And on the other end of it, oh there's the mess. Okay, so what do we have here? Well, this is the aforementioned and very snazzy dual link DVI. Then next up, we have a FireWire pass-through, followed by a USB pass-through, and then we have our power connector. But here's the thing, Apple was clearly so focused on getting everything all into this one chord to make a nice clean setup that they forgot to really factor in the usability of this long-term.

When you plug this into a Power Mac, it's great because it goes under the desk, that's where you put your power supply, that's where you plug all of these pass-throughs in and then you can use the ports up here and it's beautiful. It's flawless. But once you try to do it with anything else, well things get really annoying because the power cord can only be like eight inches away from the rest of this cord which is also where the display connection is. You see, Apple thought of this because when they started moving over to Mini DisplayPort and then later Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2, they came up with a clever solution. They just made the adapter really long. I'm just going to plug in the DVI over here, and then we'll plug in our USB so now when we go to get our Thunderbolt 2-equipped MacBook Pro from 2014 things couldn't be easier. Just open it up, plug it on in there, plug the USB in there, and in just a short while, we get an output at full 2560 by 1600 resolution. Ironically, the same resolution as the native display on this MacBook Pro.

But ironically, this simplicity belies some complications under the surface. You might think that plugging in this USB is only necessary for powering the USB 2 hub on the back of this monitor. Well, this is what happens if you try to get away without using the USB. The display dies. So, this adapter is not just passing through this USB for the hub; it actually powers the adapter. It's part of what makes this display work, and that can become really, really irritating, especially if you like many people nowadays have a Mac that primarily uses USBC.

We've got ourselves the M1 Max MacBook Pro, nice and easy, let's go ahead and grab a look at this. The Apple-specific Thunderbolt to USB-C adapter is what we need to make it work right. So, if we plug that in here, then clearly, we're getting that special sauce that they baked into this thing. To make it work. Nothing happens. This does not work, and I know you might be thinking, "Oh Luke, but remember maybe you have to plug in USB?" Nope. Doesn't work.

At this point, when working on this video, this was really just starting to piss me off because this is a really cool old display that looks really great, and I really wanted to use it, but I just couldn't find a way to use it with a modern machine until I finally found this adapter on Amazon. I'll put a link to that down in the description below, but I don't know how they've pulled this off.

We can get rid of this 80 Apple adapter. Get rid of the 50 Apple adapter down there. I'm just gonna plug that in no USB into here. Give it a second and look at that. We now have the gorgeous 30-inch Apple Cinema Display working with an M1 Max, the latest and greatest. The M1 Macbook Pro, it works.

So, would I recommend buying one of these now in 2022? Well, I mean it's a very specific use case because when you buy a monitor, you expect to be able to plug most things into it, but that's definitely not the case here. So, you'll have to do your research. The thing is, I only paid $200 for this display. I think it was $250 because I had to buy the power adapter separately, and then it was another $45 dollars for the dongle that worked with this display. So, I guess you're looking at around $250-$300 to get this thing hooked up to a modern Apple Silicon MacBook Pro. And honestly, that seems like a pretty good deal to me. I mean, I'd rather spend the money on this monitor than on a RAM upgrade in the Macbook Pro. This this seems much more useful. But I am curious to know what you guys think is this a good deal in 2022? What do you think of the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display?