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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."
Let's start with HDMI. What a complete pile of shit. Sync issues, audio/video latency, cable quality issues. I will concede HDMI is superior to the technologies that required half a dozen RCA connectors or separate audio and video connectors, but are we really acting like HDMI is some sort of perfect technology? I have spent far too much time screwing with overscan and lip sync issues for games or movies that just make me want to throw my Smart TV out the window.
So Apple comes out with a connector that seems to be pretty amazing. They pipe the data to a chip and everything magically works. There are some limitations possibly, although at this point it could still be just a bug, but otherwise it works for those people that for whatever reason absolutely need a cabled connection. Many offices these days are putting Apple TVs up, so I have no need within our conference rooms or at my house for a cabled video connection, but I might still buy one of these if I'm at a customer site and the projector happens to support HDMI. It would be very nice if this adapter supported uncompressed 1080p and it might very well, we just don't know. I'm guessing it is a bug.
That said, what is the use case for tethering an iPad to your TV and requiring zero latency? Do we call this the Real Racing 3 requirement? That seems to be what we are talking about here, the case where an iPad is a Wii U, and that seems fairly minor. I believe that the connector and Airplay will always have too much latency for that kind of gaming, but I'm willing to be amazed. Even if it has too much latency for gaming I don't think many people are going to find this to be a show stopper.
Do you want me to go dig up the story about Nexus tablets outselling the iPad? I will if you want.
You can try. But you'll fail.