When Apple officially discontinued the Thunderbolt Display, directing customers to look at third-party displays, it naturally led to speculation about whether this was a temporary or permanent state of affairs. Now Reddit users are upping the speculation by pointing to a redirect on the company’s website.
Reddit user samuhlarik10 noticed that www.apple.com/displays/ redirects to www.apple.com/mac/, and a second user noted that Apple had used a 301 rather than a 302 code to perform the redirect. Technically, 301 indicates a permanent redirect, while 302 is used for a temporary one.
The speculation is a stretch for two reasons. First, most SEO sites recommend that 301 is almost always preferred over 302, even when a redirect is temporary – and that not even Google draws a distinction between the two.
It’s a permanent (301) redirect. These types of redirects are aggressively cached by browsers and search engines. If there was a chance that this particular URL would feature content again in the future, they would have used a temporary (302) redirect.
Second, it appears that the online Apple Store has now sold out of the discontinued displays, which would be reason enough to remove the link.
Many had previously expressed surprise that Apple hadn’t updated the Thunderbolt Display since 2011, making it look extremely outdated at a time when pretty much everyone is making 4K monitors across all price-points. This looked all the more surprising after Apple launched a 5K iMac.
However, our own sources tell us that Apple is working on an external 5K display with an integrated GPU – though suggestions that this would be unveiled at WWDC were, as we reported, unfounded.
It has also been observed that the WWDC keynote video was released in a 21:9 format, perhaps hinting that Apple’s next display may be an ultrawide one? Looks like we may need to wait a while to find out, but our money is on new Apple displays appearing in the near future.
