Is Apple working on 8K display for its completely rethought Mac Pro?

Apple is working on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro model with a highly modular design, slated for release in 2018, that should cater to the needs of its most-demanding pro users. As confirmed by company executives earlier this week, its engineers are also developing an external display that will launch at some point next year, too.

According to the Pike’s Universe blog, the rumored Apple-branded display will feature a massive 8K resolution, giving it twice the pixels of a standard 4K screen and sixty percent more pixels than the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display.

“Apple is also working on a 8K display for the next generation of Mac Pros,” reads the story. Let’s assume for a moment that Pike’s Universe’s source can be trusted.

If there’s in fact such a thing as a standalone 8K display in Apple’s labs, we can infer from its huge resolution that the company will primarily target it at people who are in the market for a next-generation Mac Pro.

And with the horizontal resolution in the order of 8,000 pixels, it would form the total image dimensions of 7,680 by 4,320 pixels—or more than 33 million pixels!

The report says it’ll be “much more like a PC with the next generation EFI BIOS.”

In other words, this won’t be the monitor for the rest of us. Apple will likely price it out of reach of anyone who doesn’t do the most demanding creative things for a living, like CAD, virtual reality content development, film production and more.

Just a few months ago, Apple confirmed it had exited the standalone display business.

The news came much to the dismay of customers like yours truly who have been patiently keeping their fingers crossed for a 4K-enabled Thunderbolt Display from Apple.

True, Apple did try to appease customers by offering LG’s UltraFine 4K and UltraFine 5K displays at temporarily reduced prices.

That didn’t go too well because users started complaining about interference when an UltraFine monitor was used near a router, which led to image distortion.

That annoying problem has since been fixed, but the fact remains that LG’s UltraFine monitors are not ultimate docking station in a way Apple’s Thunderbolt Display was.

For instance, UltraFine monitors lack a Gigabit Ethernet port that the now discontinued Thunderbolt Display used to provide along with one FireWire 800 port, three USB ports and a dedicated Thunderbolt port.

You would simply connect your MacBook to your Thunderbolt Display via a Thunderbolt cable and all those ports (plus stereo sound, microphone input and video data from built-in webcam) would become available to your Mac.

The blog doesn’t say when the 8K monitor may go on sale, but Apple said it won’t be ready this year.

Image: Two Thunderbolt Displays connected to a MacBook Pro.

Source: Pike’s Universe