Marco.org

Great news:

Some displays with resolutions higher than 4K require two DisplayPort cables to connect the display at full resolution. With OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 or later, the Dell UP2715K 27-inch 5K display is supported on the following Mac computers:

• Mac Pro (Late 2013)
• iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014)

Before, the only way to get a 5K display on a Mac was to either get the 5K iMac (the route I chose, and haven’t regretted for a second) or put a GTX 980 into an old tower Mac Pro and jump through some hoops and hacks to get it to work. Native, hack-free Mac external-display support was limited to 4K.

Now, owners of the new Mac Pro can finally have a 5K display… for $2500 (the base price of the entire 5K iMac). And it has to be a Dell, whose monitors usually have good panels but ugly casings and inconsistent controls. But if I still had a Mac Pro and had no interest in the 5K iMac, I’d jump on this option.

That said, since selling my Mac Pro and getting the 5K iMac last fall, I’ve had zero regrets. It’s just as fast as the Mac Pro in my usage (and about 25% faster at single-threaded tasks), and it has the best display I’ve ever seen on any device — it even makes the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro look muddy and primitive by comparison. And while its fan becomes audible under a long, sustained, heavy CPU load (which wasn’t the case with the always-inaudible Mac Pro), that hardly ever happens for me in practice unless I’m encoding a video or batch-processing hundreds of photos.