Apple today announced a 17" LCD Display. It's been anticipated, and looks great. At $999 it's a really good price point for a 1280x1024 display, especially for Apple's excellent LCD quality.

So here's the rub: They no longer sell CRT monitors (no real problem there) and all the LCD displays require Apple's ADC connector, a digital monitor/usb/power connector that exists only on G4 PowerMacs and Cubes.

In short, Apple doesn't sell any displays that can be used with the notebook computers they sell. Apple doesn't carry any adapters, nor do they advertise that any are available, to let me use the VGA port on my Powerbook.

On one hand this pisses me off, as this is a monitor I would actually buy, but I'm not going to buy a desktop mac just to run it. On the other hand, this may be what Apple feels is a necessary move to drive new hardware sales. Palm Computing recently announced unit shipments were less than half of what they anticipated, and this is largely because people are happy with the Palm PDAs they have, and the added functionality of new models isn't enough to get them to discard a working Palm and pay $300 for what amounts to an incremental upgrade.

It's possible that this is Apple's worry as well, and by making great displays that will only work with new machines, they are attempting to create a larger incentive to move to new hardware (the monitors also won't work with older G4 powermacs or any G3 powermac). Some say this is the rationale behind OS X's requirements, and while that's a contestable point, it's pretty clear that Apple has little motivation to make OS X compatable with older Nu-Bus Macs, a feat it has admitted is technically possible but logistically unlikely.

Anyhow, I'm just venting. The monitor looks great, and I'd love a machine to use it with, but I'm really happy with my G3 Bronze powerbook. I am looking for a second monitor for it, and would get the 17" display if it would work, but this doesn't seem too likely. It's even less likely that Apple will start offering ADC ports in powerbooks since ADCs are still rare in the world and a powerbook's video options are designed to be compatible with all the scenarios a mobile professional is likely to come across in the field (S-Video, RCA video, and VGA outputs).

Ah well, maybe some day...