Is the Apple Thunderbolt Display just a display, or something more?
The thing that confuses me is that they say it has a Thunderbolt cable and it helps data transfer between your Mac and Display to be much faster. What data transfer? Isn't it just a display mirroring whatever is already showing on the MacBook display?
Does it have a hard drive or something?
Best Answer
The thunderbolt display actually has a number of additional peripherals in it:
Speakers and a microphone (ditto)
It also has a laptop charger (magjack) for convenience.
This is accomplished via the fact that thunderbolt can carry PCIe signals in addition to the normal display image, so the peripherals in the display act like they're built into the laptop.
There is actually the potential to even have an entire GPU in the external display, though no current devices implement the option.