Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina can now support Dell’s 5K display

By Krystle Vermes Published May 29, 2015

Apple has updated its support page to show that its 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro will be able to drive Dell’s UP2715K 27-inch 5K display.

When Apple released its 10.10.3 OS X in April, there was support for the dual-cable Dell monitor on the Retina 5K iMac and 2013 Mac Pro. However, none of its notebooks supported the display at the time. As it reads, the support document now has “MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) with AMD Radeon R9 M370X” listed.

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Dell’s dual-cable 5K display needs more bandwidth to operate that what’s currently supported by a single DisplayPort cable. At the moment, it uses a dual-cable solution that requires two Thunderbolt ports on a Mac.

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In addition, the page says that the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro is capable of driving most single-stream 4K displays at 60Hz on OS X 10.10.3. Any 15-incher from mid-2014 or later can handle that resolution.

The 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has a 2880-by-1800 native resolution at 220 pixels per inch. Its HDMI video output can support 1080p resolution at up to 60 Hz, 3840-by-2160 resolution at 30 Hz and 4096-by-2160 resolution at 24 Hz. You need to use DisplayPort for 4K at 60Hz or dual DisplayPort for 5K.

The Mac Pro (Late 2013) and iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014 and later) also support 4K displays, along with the MacBook Air (Early 2015), MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015), and Mac Mini (Late 2014). The latter two can’t handle 60Hz playback, however.

The Intel Skylake platform will have DisplayPort 1.3 when it debuts later this year. This will allow Apple to update its Macs to include support for external 5K displays with a single cable. In turn, this opens up the potential for Apple to release a single-cable 5K display of its own, but only time will tell if that will happen.

Dell’s UP2715 27-inch 5K monitor retails for $2500. It has a 5120-by-2880 resolution, as well as 99 percent AdobeRGB and 100 percent sRGB coverage. It has more than 14 million pixels. We scored it well when we reviewed it, though it’s hard to recommend for everyone given its incredible price.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Krystle Vermes is a professional writer, blogger and podcaster with a background in both online and print journalism. Her…

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