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Comment by mjlee | Hacker News Reader

Especially egregious when you consider older iMacs could be used as external displays - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105126

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While it is a shame it was never brought back, at the time it was removed it was unavoidable since the bandwidth required for 5k was beyond what could be carried across a single display port cable.

Displayport 1.3 which supports 5k 60fps became widely available with the NVIDIA 900 series just 5 months after the 5K iMac released. AMD followed suit 1 year after.

They could have very soon added support for it, maybe even launched with DP 1.3 support if they worked something out with AMD.

I'd love to see a regulator mandate that computers like the iMac that have built in screens must have HDMI ports that allow them to be used as monitors.

This would be great for the consumer and prevent a lot of ewaste as people can use obsolete computers as monitors well past their useful lifespan as a monitor.

HDMI might be a bit more complex, but displayport should be doable since most devices use embedded displayport (eDP) anyway for their built in displays. I'm guessing the main cost would be adding a switching chip for switching between external and internal source.

Even laptops?

HDMI is really not a very good choice as they try to block open source implementations: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...

It should be kept out of regulations.

This is why we need a standard that has both HDMI and DP connector options, but DP signalling.

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