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Apple's Lightning-to-HDMI Dongle Secretly Packed With ARM, Airplay
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."
Wouldnt it be easier to do it on the device itself?
Thing is, MHL sends uncompressed 1080p over a cheap, standardized cable. Apple's standard, evidently, does not. And like you said, it's worse than the old docking cable in this regard. Regression is extra silly.
Looking at most MHL cable prices from vendors, they're cheaper than Apple's adaptor, but not cheap.
And as I mentioned, MHL drives up device prices because it requires additional circuitry in the device. Standardized cable you say? Try plugging an MHL cable into a Nexus 7. Won't work? That's because the chips required for MHL were too expensive and they were left off the Nexus 7.
Shifting half the expense to the device and half the expense to the cable isn't cheaper, it's just moving costs.
Don't get confused. The high-tech Intel interconnect once known as LightPeak is called Thunderbolt. Here, we are talking the proprietary, low-tech, USB-like symmetrical connector Apple uses on their recent iOS devices, whose name is on purpose confusing everyone with its better counterpart.
And from what we see here, it's markedly worse than the alternatives Apple shunned, but that were based on standards (MHL, USB3), because those would have prevented Apple from imposing drastic licensing conditions on accessory manufacturers.
Airplay is a network streaming technology. The network can be wired or wireless.
The new dock connector is superior in exactly two ways:
1. Thinner.
2. You can put it in either way up... because the device has additional electronics to detect which way around the cable is and adapt accordingly.
The second of those is a triviality: It really doesn't matter hugely if you can put the connector in first time without looking. It saves the user only a few seconds at most. The first is the only reason for lightning. Consumer demand and Apple policy are towards thinner and thinner products, with Apple leading the charge: They introduced lightning for the same reason the Macbook Pro lost ethernet. The connector became the limitation on thinnness, so it had to go.
It's like a car company offering a stabilized phonograph in your car, for your ultra-high fidelity analog listening pleasure, and then not being able to make the interface between the phonograph and the stereo work and bailing and having the phonograph input through an FM band transmitter that plays through the radio.
Fact: Apple has an ARM processor in the cable. It is fair to assume the video is processed by the chip in the cable.
The rest of the facts in this case are just speculation:
* Is design a 'limitation', or a design choice?
* Is the 1600x900 output seen by Panic a Panic problem or an Apple one? Is it a bug or a limitation of the hardware? File a bug and find out
* Is the connector providing Airplay over the 6cm cable? Pure speculation. Sounds plausible, even clever, but that is just a guess.
It seems to me that there is certainly an interesting story in this adapter, but I don't think we know what that story is yet.
10 seconds searching Amazon turned up an MHL cable for £3.50, extremely cheap. The Apple version is £37.
Standardized cable you say? Try plugging an MHL cable into a Nexus 7. Won't work? That's because the chips required for MHL were too expensive and they were left off the Nexus 7.
I'm not sure how that makes it non standard. Are you saying for something to be standardized every device must support it? That's crazy talk.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't think you grasp the actual advantage to lightning. It has one HUGE advantage that no other cable would provide. It forces vendor lock-in while at the same time instanly obsoleting all previous Apple cables. It's a marketing dream! (nightmare for users, but since when has Apple ever cared about them?)
The electronics involved have nothing to do with AirPlay, and this is not "news" in any way. Sorry to ruin excitement and conspiracy theories... :-)
I am willing to bet serious money that all these chips do is decode whatever proprietary protocol Apple uses for transmitting video over the Lightning port to a standard HDCP protected HDMI signal. This is needed because the Lightning port has no other way of transmitting the video - and this has been clear from the day Apple revealed the Lightning port to the world. It is really just a high-speed 8-pin serial connector. Nothing else.
In addition the chips probably try to introduce a classic vendor lock-in factor, making it hard for 3rd party vendors to provide similar cables and accessories for the Lightning port without paying royalties to Apple (read: legal tech-extortion).
Also, the scaling-problems mentioned are without a doubt due to the screen-mirror scheme involved. If they streamed an actual 1080p video file directly, the result would likely be very different.
The speculation in the article is so far from reality it almost hurts... They get points for taking it apart and all, but they could have reached the correct conclusion merely by reading up on the existing specs of the Lightning port (if they had bothered to add a bit of digital-video knowledge from Wikipedia that is).
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Next time you're driving behind me let me know by flashing your lights. When we take off at the traffic light going up the hill I'll put my foot on the clutch and then take a tea break while we count the number of horses powering my wheels while my foot isn't on the accelerator.
Question, do you actually believe the garbage you wrote? Automatic gearboxes can be tuned for performance to shift at the ideal spot every time. Maybe not in your shitty sedan but there's a reason why many motorsports use automatic gearboxes.
How quickly you change gear makes absolutely no difference to performance. *When* you change gear is crucial, and no automatic gearbox can solve that problem.
So what you are saying, is that I can take 17 seconds to change a gear, but if I change it at just the right moment, ill lose no performance at all compared with somebody who changes gears in 1 second?
Sir, I am in awe of your logic.
You clearly dont drive a manual.
I can accelerate into a corner, put the clutch in, slow and gear down as I turn and use heel to toe whilst releasing the clutch as I come out of the turn for better acceleration. Admittedly, I do this at roundabouts more often than I should.
An Automatic gearbox has to wait until I start to accelerate to drop back down a gear. Automatic gearboxes are always reactionary, a good manual driver is proactive. There is no way, any current production auto can pre-empt what a driver is going to do. Maybe when we've invented enough AI but then again, if we have computers advanced enough to tell what a person will do with that regularity, a person will be sitting in the back sipping martini's whilst the car does all the work.
When I drive auto's, especially "sports" automatic transmissions, they always gear up when I put my foot down, then when they realise I've put my foot down they drop a gear and jump 2000 RPM. Not smooth at all.
What the GP should have said, is that when you drive a manual, you can be in gear before you need it, an Auto is always going to be in gear after you need it... then again if you drove a manual you'd know that (or be really, really crap at driving a manual, in either case my point stands).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Dual Clutch Transmission in a BMW 135i here. Long time manual driver prior to getting this car, and in fact my last car before it (BMW 545i) I went all the way to North Carolina to buy because it had a stick instead of an auto.
My car is really a truly clutchless manual that happens to have an automatic mode. When I start my car in the morning and shift it to "drive", the first thing I do is click the shifter into the gate to the left and then click up once. That puts the transmission in a pure manual mode that will hold a gear until you shift it. I could drive to work in first gear if I so desired and the transmission wouldn't upshift. Of course, I wouldn't be doing much good for my gas mileage either, but the point is that I could. There are paddles on the steering wheel, but I tend to use the shifter because it's natural for me to reach down there for gear changes anyway; I flip the shifter away from me to downshift, toward me to upshift. It's incredibly natural.
As for performance driving, I can anticipate the curves and downshift appropriately every time, far faster than I ever could with a stick and clutch. Sure, it's sequential in the same sense that my motorbike is; I can't go from 6th gear to 3rd, I have to click through all the intervening gears. However, the incredibly fast shifts mean that I can get from 7th (my top gear) all the way to 3rd in about the same amount of time as it would've taken me with a stick. I lose nothing.
And for those that say that shift times make no difference; I have dragged (on a track, thank you) two identical cars; one with the DCT and the other with a stick. We did two runs in our own cars and two in each others... the result was always that the DCT equipped car was a good 3/10 quicker consistently in the quarter. Part of that is final drive (the DCT has a different final drive that gets better acceleration at the cost of slightly worse gas mileage) but even calculating that in we figured the shift times were gaining 1/10 on the quarter. Not much, but still faster.
Having said all this, have you driven the most recent 8 speed autos coming out? I have driven a BMW 535i with the 8 speed and was incredibly impressed by that thing. Yes, it's a torque-converter automatic but the technology has come a long way. Modern automatics really don't lose anything to a stick unless you happen to be a professional race driver. Of course, that would have to have been a professional race driver before 1992 because almost all race cars today use sequential manuals or dual clutch transmissoins... the days of rowing your own gears on the racetrack have been over for decades.