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(Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

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Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#61

Post by HNLogInShit »

dmishe wrote: post #2

I think the main takeaway is that yes, lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to. I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cycle was in the first place though.

"lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to"

Uh, no. It can't even deliver HD resolution video. In fact, it can't deliver shitty degraded video riddled with compression artifacts at HD resolution. How is that "future proof"? It's not even up to present-day standards.

But keep shilling for Apple.

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#63

Post by scott_karana »

buro9 wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a strange day when we move from cables that work perfectly well to cables that need to be software upgradeable to work as well. Yes, it's a strange day when we move from "cables that work perfectly well BUT the device with the ports they connect to has to be replaced whenever a new technology cames along" to "cables that need to be software upgradable but are far more future proof and capable all the while fre…

That is a problem entirely of our own making. The stereo beside me has components that span 30 years and uses the same cabling for all components. I realise someone will come back with "Oh, but DRM, encryption, needing more information about the source and destination"... but I'd counter by pointing out that telecoms cabling works perfectly well for transporting all kinds of things across it. You can put into protoco…

While I sympathize, this isn't just about A/V standards.

This allows for absolutely ANYTHING, barring bandwidth concerns.

Ubiquitous body computers with skin access ports? We can make an interface for that.

"Quantum broadcast" antenna technology? We can make a dongle for that.

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#64

Post by Someone »

Cushman wrote: post #31
bitcartel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main takeaway is, why pay for a $50 widget when a $5 cable will do the job? For the consumer who just wants to connect their device to a HDTV, it's crazy they have to pay 10x more just because they're in the Apple ecosystem and not Android. As for being future-proof, by the time some cool new A/V interface hits the market, and we've all updated our TVs, the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum.

Somebody has to pay the piper-- the hardware to transmit HDMI has to exist somewhere. With a smart adapter, only the people who need the feature have to pay for it.

But given economy of scale, they (per person) will pay more for it than the amount they would have paid if everybody bought that hardware in their phone.

And economy of scale does work. I do not think Apple can seriously undercut Samsung because they managed to leave out a HDMI chip.

I think Apple's reason for this connector is more one of aesthetics: why have X > 1 chips that can communicate with the outside world and, typically, X connectors? Full wireless is not yet an option, so they need one. Then, they need some way to figure out what is on the other end of the line.

Why they didn't pick USB3, I don't know. Not proprietary enough? Connectors too bulky? Low power spec not (yet) available? Not flexible enough? Supports too many devices? (If you put an USB connector in, people will expect that it works with their hard disk, photo camera, keyboard, mouse, etc)

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#65

Post by cstross »

buro9 wrote: post #44

It's a strange day when we move from cables that work perfectly well to cables that need to be software upgradeable to work as well.

Peripherals that need to be software upgradable have been getting lower-level for a while. (My camera has software upgradable lenses.)

Personally, I'm waiting for software-upgradable domestic light switches and mains plugs. Then we're in trouble ...

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#66

Post by buro9 »

scott_karana wrote: post #63
buro9 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a problem entirely of our own making. The stereo beside me has components that span 30 years and uses the same cabling for all components. I realise someone will come back with "Oh, but DRM, encryption, needing more information about the source and destination"... but I'd counter by pointing out that telecoms cabling works perfectly well for transporting all kinds of things across it. You can put into protoco…

While I sympathize, this isn't just about A/V standards. This allows for absolutely ANYTHING, barring bandwidth concerns. Ubiquitous body computers with skin access ports? We can make an interface for that. "Quantum broadcast" antenna technology? We can make a dongle for that.

Which is precisely why I gave the example of cabling for telecommunications.

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#67

Post by nirvana »

Ideology has trumped engineering, and as hackers, you shouldn't tolerate it.

Frankly, all of this has been obvious all along to any competent engineer, since the moment Apple introduced lightening. They described it as a serial bus and talked about how it gave more flexibility. If you think about it for 2 seconds its obviously better to run protocols over a serial bus than to run 30 lines of individual signals, with dedicated lines for analog and dedicated lines for digital in a world where people want HDMI adapters for a connector that originally had firewire signals on it, from a time before HDMI was even common.

But this is Apple, so the REAL reality distortion field kicked in-- a tsunami of press acting as if Apple was ripping people off with a $30 adapter, hundreds of mindless conspiracy theories from Apple bashers on Hacker News about how this is to have more control over people and how this once again proves that "open" (defined as google, not actually anything to do with openness) is better than "closed" (defined as Apple, you know the company with the most popular open source operating system in the world?).

It's one thing to not know enough engineering for this to have been obvious to you, it's quite another to spread lies and engineering ignorance as a result of your ideological hatred of Apple. And the latter is basically all I saw on HN about this format. (Which is one of the reasons I write HN off as worthless for months at a time.)

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#68

Post by nirvana »

noonespecial wrote: post #30

There’s no shell in the image, there’s no utilities (analogous to what we used to call the “BSD Subsystem” in Mac OS X). It boots straight into a daemon designed to accept incoming data...(and the fact that the firmware is stored in RAM rather then ROM)... But there could be. In fact, it could do almost anything as its a powerful little computer in its own right and it sounds an awful lot like it boots the kernel and…

A little thought experiment... some clever dudes manage to reverse engineer enough to "jailbreak" this, and then they put a little OS image on it and start hacking away... then a bunch of people say "hey, this is really cool! It's like Apple made a little raspberry pi for us!" but then even more say "but it's so limited, it doesn't have USB out, etc, etc."

And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled" the device by not giving it USB and how this "proves" Apple just wants "control" and why did they have to jailbreak it anyway?

In the process of getting their panties all bundled up they never realize they're bitching about an adapter not being a general computing platform.

They're also proving Apple right-- it's engineered to solve a specific problem and provide specific functionality. Even if it were jailbroken from the factory, people would be complaining and demanding that it does other things... than what it was designed to do.

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#69

Post by rdl »

buro9 wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a strange day when we move from cables that work perfectly well to cables that need to be software upgradeable to work as well. Yes, it's a strange day when we move from "cables that work perfectly well BUT the device with the ports they connect to has to be replaced whenever a new technology cames along" to "cables that need to be software upgradable but are far more future proof and capable all the while fre…

That is a problem entirely of our own making. The stereo beside me has components that span 30 years and uses the same cabling for all components. I realise someone will come back with "Oh, but DRM, encryption, needing more information about the source and destination"... but I'd counter by pointing out that telecoms cabling works perfectly well for transporting all kinds of things across it. You can put into protoco…

The amount of engineering that goes into making devices work over the huge installed base of cat5/cat5e/cat6 twisted pair is pretty amazing; I was amazed Gig-E worked, let alone 10GE.

If there weren't the huge installed base of wires in the walls of buildings, we probably would have different standards for patch cables instead of fairly obscenely complex network interfaces.

Re: (Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

#70

Post by seabee »

dmishe wrote: post #39
taligent wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they use H.264 and their existing hardware ? Do you really think it makes more sense to decode H.264 on the device then re-encode it in another format and then decode that on the adapter ? Sounds slow, illogical and bound to introduce more artifacts.

Nope. This is _the_ question here, what prevented them from pushing framebuffer data to the adapter, which then puts it into HDMI compatible form

You'd need 3Gbps to push uncompressed 1080p data. If you look at USB 3.0 and make a not-unreasonable bet that Lightning is slower, then you simply don't have the bandwidth to do so.
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