Monitors with 4k resolutions are increasingly widespread and it is inevitable that they will become the industry standard in a very short time, relegating the already well-known Full-HD to the background, for this reason Apple knows that the following step is to support these monitors on your computers. However, so far, especially the MacBook range, with the inclusion of Thunderbolt 2 connections, they have achieved full support for this type of monitors, by this I mean that now with Broadwell-U CPUs and new integrated GPUs 3840 × 2160 resolutions can be displayed with a 60Hz screen refresh rate when connected using the DisplayPort 1.2 specification already included in Thunderbolt 2.
On the other hand before with Haswell CPU architecture, this connection was capped at 30Hz maintaining the same resolution, even at 24Hz if it was done through the HDMI 1.4 connection, something that is obviously insufficient for all kinds of uses unless we dedicate the screen in question and exclusively to the reproduction of movies.
The most curious thing about this matter is that the Apple specifications page tells us that the new MacBook Air are only capable of supporting 2560 x 1600 on external monitors when in practice this is not true, since in effect they do support said resolution . On the contrary, in MacBook Pro they do mention this possibility but also specify support for 3840 x 2160 resolution at 30Hz in HDMI 1.4 when it is not true either, since it is limited to 24Hz. Naps interested in an external monitor To connect it to your new MacBook Air, you just have to make sure that it has a connection that Comply with the DisplayPort 1.2 standard natively.
So far the beautiful part, the downside of all this is that we are talking about a MacBook Air, that is, a computer predestined for portability, power being a less important aspect in its specifications so if we use a 4K @ 60Hz monitor and we want to rescale to «retina» or HiDPI resolutions, the animations will slow down and in general the graphic system will inevitably drag.
