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Apple's Lightning-to-HDMI Dongle Secretly Packed With ARM, Airplay

Posted by Soulskill on from the also-a-reservoir-of-hipness dept.

New submitter joelville writes "After noticing artifacts and a 1600 × 900 image in the output from Apple's new Lightning Digital AV Adapter, the Panic Blog sawed it open and found an ARM chip inside. They suspect that video bypasses the cable entirely and instead uses Airplay to stream three inches to make up for the Lightning connector's shortcomings."

2 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Stop the presses! by tlambert · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Stop the presses! The are scaling 1024x768 content to 1600x900, and there are MPEG artifacts happening as a result?!?! The deuce you say! There's never artifacts when you scale things! Never, I say!

    Next thing I know, you'll be claiming that Apple didn't replace all the already transcoded content on the Inktomi CDN with new, higher resolution content over night!

    It's almost already too scandalous that they used a CPU and software to avoid having to design and spin silicon for a Lightning-to-HDMI converter ASIC.

    I can only echo some of the sentiments expressed in the bad ratings they received in several reviews from owners of Samsung Televisions which improperly negotiate EDID information by failing to negotiate on input sources which are not selected at the time the device comes online. One would almost think this might be an issue for Linux systems when trying to use HDMI to output to Samsung equipment, or that Dish Network DVRs might have similar problems (with the fix being to plug the device into the input channel which is selected by default when the television is powered on).

  2. Re:Good engineering? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Remember when Apple was known (at least by the general public) as being the company with simple, elegant engineering?

    They still are, by many orders of magnitude. Can you point to a single other company that can pack an entire computer into a video out dongle and have it work as reliably and as brilliantly as this? No you CANT. No Linsux engineer could do it, no windblows engineer could do it. It took Apple to turn a hardware issue into a pure software issue and make it JUST WORK. They are basically so far ahead of the rest of the industry, no one really understands how it works. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, freetards.