By the hammer of Thor! With the new Thunderbolt Display in our hands, the future is looking bright.

• 27" TFT Active-Matrix LCD
• 2560 by 1440 Pixel Resolution
• Built-in Thunderbolt and MagSafe Cables
• FaceTime HD Camera with Microphone
• 49 Watt 2.1 Speaker System
• 16:9 Widescreen Aspect Ratio

The Thunderbolt Display contains a sweet lineup of USB, HDMI, VGA, and DisplayPort ports! Oh wait—wrong thousand-dollar display.

The luscious backside of the Thunderbolt Display contains only a small line of specified ports:

• Three powered USB 2.0 ports
• FireWire 800 port
• Thunderbolt port
• Gigabit Ethernet port.

The Thunderbolt Display also comes with a built-in Thunderbolt cable attached to a Universal MagSafe cable.

It seems to be a convenient setup for connecting to your laptop's Thunderbolt port while charging, unless of course you are sporting a Mid 2011 MacBook Air and your MagSafe port is opposite your Thunderbolt.

Much like the iMac we tore apart earlier this year (and the iMacs before it), the Thunderbolt Display's front glass panel comes off with the help of some heavy duty suction cups.

While we're handling this gigantic sheet of silica, we thought we'd share a fun glass fact with you: the Plymouth Barracuda featured—at its time—the largest piece of automotive glass produced to date.

It's time to take a look under the hood. With the help of our 54-piece bit driver kit, we liberate a few screws (12 to be exact, but who's counting?) from their asylum.

A few connectors and a ground screw are all that prevent the freedom of the LCD.

The 27-inch (diagonal) TFT active-matrix LCD has a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, the standard for displays of this size and price. Its 12 ms response time and 16.7 million colors, however, fall short of the 6 ms response time and 1.07 billion colors of Dell's comparable display.

We might be splitting hairs here, but those hairs would be viewed with 1,053,300,000 fewer colors on Apple's display. Just saying.

Be it 16.7 million or 1.07 billion colors, we say, "Let's see what you've got, Crayola!"

The back of the LCD display has only a few cables, none too exciting:

• DisplayPort
• LED backlight
• LED backlight sync
• Ground loop.

The LG display reads model number LM270WQ1. Is it possible that we may have seen this model number before?

Yes, it appears to be the same display found in the iMac Intel 27" from October of 2009, as well as the same basic LG display found in Dell's competing 27" monitor, though the Apple version uses LED backlights as opposed to Dell's traditional CCFL.

Dell's version is also matte, something that lots of Mac users have been harping for once the old 30" Cinema Display was phased out.

Great Odin's Raven! With that old, crappy LCD removed (who needs it anyway), we get a full frontal view of the Thunderbolt Display's inner layout.

Where to start . . . the fan you say? Sounds good to us.