Thunderbolt Display With Built-in GPU Theory

John Gruber:

A 27-inch standalone retina display will be a genuine finally. If they announce it at WWDC, the crowd will go nuts. But just how they’ll drive it is a fascinating question. Using two Thunderbolt cables would be clunky. Maybe one cable that forks into two Thunderbolt adapters at the end?

UPDATE: Best guess so far, from Stephen Foskett:

@gruber What if Apple put the graphics card in the monitor? It would work with most (all?) Thunderbolt Macs and wouldn’t require 2 cables…

I’d bet on this.

The problem with this solution is that the GPU would have to be upgradeable. People buy screens for years, while GPUs tend to get updated much more often, and newer models usually boast significant gains.

I wouldn’t bother spending 1-2K (or more) on an LCD which doesn’t have a GPU I can replace. Nor would I want to buy a new screen every few years, just to get the latest and greatest GPU. And looking at Apple’s history, I seriously doubt a newer model of GPU would be introduced regularly and in a timely manner.