(Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

Post by sneak » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 2:01 PM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #67

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…

Post by rdl » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 2:08 PM UTC

senthilnayagam wrote: post #80

rdl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

all use Ethernet and standards are set for them, all peripherals need to talk to it in same protocol and newer devices should be back compatible . But with lightning you can design cables which need not use device computing power for all transformations, it is pretty smart, they built this cable for the next decade we will see interesting applications from apple and its partners in coming years

Post by lobster_johnson » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 2:23 PM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #68

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 "cripp…

Post by esolyt » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 2:34 PM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #67

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…

Post by giovannibajo1 » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 3:13 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #57

gilgoomesh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's every indication that Lightning can handle much more than this but in order to get the hardware running quickly, they've reused settings that were previous used for WiFi data rates. All we can guess is that Lightning can handle somewhere between 10Mbps (AirPlay over WiFi) and 2Gbps (native HDMI rates). We have absolutely no idea where in that range its actual capabilities lie.

I'm guessing its actual capabilities are basically just USB 2.0. Someone tore apart a Lightning-to-USB sync cable ages ago and the data pins are apparently wired straight through - so we know that Lightning can speak it natively - and given all the focus on simplicity and not doing multiplexing at the expense of more complexity in the adapter I can't see any reason why Apple would develop their own protocol.