The Best Monitor for a New Macbook Pro is an OLD Thunderbolt Display

Earlier this year, we started purchasing new Macbook Pros for our office and became victims of the dependency-driven cottage industry fordongles that allow you to connect your stuff to a computer that only has USB C inputs.

Dongles are one thing. They’re annoying and more expensive than you want them to be, but ultimately they amount to an inconvenience. The real issue is what monitor should you use? If you’re used to Apple Thunderbolt Displays, which elegantly act as a USB Hub and Power Supply, wrapped up with helpful features like webcam and speakers, you find yourself in a bit of a predicament.

Apple killed the Thunderbolt Display years ago and replaced it with an unnecessarily expensive (and ugly) alternative in the form of the LG UltraFine 5k Display ($1,299). It does not have any traditional USB ports and it’s 5k resolution is so high that most people scale back down to that of the old Thunderbolt Displays (2560 x 144) anyway.

But we bought one to test it out. And we bought a bunch of other USB C monitors to test them out too. Wrote a blog post evaluating them all and came to the conclusion that the Dell 27 Ultrathin Monitor: S2718D made the best sense for us, so we bought 8 of them for our new Dallas office. They look great and they power the lower wattage 13" Macbook Pros that our team there uses.

But they don’t have speakers or cameras and they don’t power the larger 15" Macbook Pros. In fact, some say that the lower wattage power supply can actually damage your 15" MBP.

So, after more time to think about it, we’ve decided that, for us, the best monitor for a new Macbook Pro is actually an old Thunderbolt Display. It has everything we need — well almost. It has:

• Compatibility (with a Thunderbolt-to-USB C dongle) across every Macbook in our office
• USB Ports (so we don’t need extra dongles, hubs or adapters)
• Speakers
• Cameras (which we use for meetings between offices)
• Decent aesthetic, if not a little dated

The only thing it cannot accommodate is power, but buying an extra power supply is cheaper and easier than buying a $1300 LG display which is the ONLY one on the market (as of now) that can power a 15" Macbook anyway.

And, it seems that nut is almost cracked too. Apple reportedly filed a patent for a magsafe / USB C adapter. No product has been released by them yet, but in the meantime, this Kickstarter product is already out claiming to do the same thing. I ordered as soon as I heard about it but admittedly mine does not work consistently and that’s not the kind of thing you can have going in and out. So I’ll continue to use my extra power supply and wait for Apple to release theirs.

Oh, the ironic path that progress sometimes takes.