DisplayPort of Pain →
And let’s be honest here. Like the hot girl in high school, the 24” is beautiful but ultimately just a high-priced, manipulative bimbo. The USB, MagSafe Power Cable and Mini DisplayPort Cable are comically short. I had purchase an extension from Monoprice just to have the Mac Pro on the floor. It has no adjustment other than tilt and picks up fingerprints if you look at it too long. But yeah. It sure is pretty.
Jeff Rock’s painstaking attempt to try to get a brand new Mac Pro to drive two brand new 24” glass Cinema Displays.
I’m disappointed that Apple discontinued the old DVI/matte 24” Cinema Display upon the launch of these, even though I’d never buy one myself (I like the amenities of the Dells), because I can’t deny that they filled an important role: the stylistic, all-in-one complement to the Mac Pro.
The new glass Cinema Display is clearly made for laptops, and only laptops. Older Mac Pros can’t drive them at all without a $300+ video card upgrade, and the newest Mac Pro can only drive one per video card (and it looks like you can only have multiple video cards if they’re all the low-end NVIDIA GT 120). By comparison, all previous Mac Pro models, with any single video card, can drive two 24” DVI Cinema Displays. And all but the first model with the lowest video card, the 7300 GT, can drive two 30” models.
Jeff’s notes on the cable length seem to confirm that these really aren’t intended for Mac Pro owners at all. So are there really a ton of people buying $900 monitors for their $1200 laptops? Seems like an odd move to have this as the only option. These problems could have been solved by keeping the older 24” Cinema Display available for purchase.