MacBook – Can the Early 2013 15“ MacBook Pro connect to a 30” Apple Cinema Display… or two

cinema-displaydisplaymacbook prothunderbolt

Someone in my area is selling some 30" Apple Cinema Displays for a pretty decent price and I'm thinking about getting one for my home office to use with my Early 2013 15" MacBook Pro. From what I understand, I would need a Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter in order to get the display's native 2560×1440 resolution, but it looks like the seller is including one (whether or not they realize it didn't originally ship with the monitor).

Bonus question: if I picked up two of these (like I said, the price is pretty good), would my laptop be able to use them both at once? I have two Thunderbolt ports (assuming the seller throws in two adapters), but I don't know if there's an internal hardware or software limitation.

I'll certainly bring my laptop to test things out, but I figured I'd check before heading to meet the seller and potentially save myself a trip.

Best Answer

Theoretically, yes.

From https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook-pro-core-i7-2.4-15-early-2013-retina-display-specs.html:

This model supports a simultaneous maximum resolution up to 2560x1600 on two external displays via Thunderbolt. Alternately, it can support a single display up to 2560x1600 via Thunderbolt and a single display up to 1920x1200 via HDMI. Although it can theoretically power all three external displays, as confirmed by a helpful reader, it runs too hot with three displays connected.