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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

#121

Post by smackfu »

bilbo0s wrote: post #97
esolyt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ideology has trumped engineering, and as hackers, you shouldn't tolerate it. Exactly. It turned out Apple's Lightning is actually inferior to a standard MicroUSB + MHL.

In what way do you believe (Lightning) is inferior? and in what way do you believe (MicroUSB + MHL) is 'standard'? Serious questions.

The sad thing is that Lightning is even inferior to the Apple 30 pin connector for this use. You get better video out on an iPhone 4S than a brand new iPhone 5, and the connector is $10 less and has a pass thru so you can charge it at the same time.

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

#122

Post by nawitus »

nathanstitt wrote: post #112
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…

I agree 100%. Software is eating the world, so I'm not sure why everyone is so against this. Maybe it's a case of I didn't complain when they came for my DEC Alpha server with green screen, nor when they took away my Token Ring network, but I will not stand for only using one flimsy cable for all my devices. Come on, this is the tech industry, what did you think was going to happen? What I see Apple's done here is fu…

>Software is eating the world, so I'm not sure why everyone is so against this.

Added latency and worse quality are pretty big things. I wan't to send pixels 1:1 to my display device, which this new technology doesn't allow.

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

#123

Post by smackfu »

runjake wrote: post #119

While the explanation seems plausible, I still have my doubts this is legitimate. From the wealth of information this anonymous person provided, they could be tracked down to a handful of employees at Apple. And if the current day Apple is anything like the year old Apple, this person is knowingly exposing themselves to termination. Edit: If you re-read the comment, the author claims they work at Apple on the technol…

"Knowledge of the design" isn't the same as "the designers." "How the HDMI adapter works" doesn't seem like it needs to be top secret internal info.

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

#124

Post by jws »

TorbjornLunde wrote: post #113
rossjudson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is true from an engineering standpoint (serial vs parallel), but has to be placed in the customer's context. In this specific case the quality is bad, operation is unreliable, and the price is high. Consumer devices accept HDMI as input. Serial to parallel video (Lightning to HDMI) is tough without some heavy-duty hardware -- hence the exorbitant cost of these adapters. The SoC design introduces a…

I strongly disagree that reversibility is a small feature. Whenever Plugging the chargers to new iOS devices is effortless the same way as headphones jacks. Non-symmetrical connectors are an affront to usability.

I appreciate reversibility once per day.

In 2074 days of owning an iPhone and 1065 days of owning an iPad I have never used or wanted an HDMI output.

I'd say they made the right tradeoff.

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

#126

Post by lucian1900 »

rossjudson wrote: post #103

His first sentence is "Airplay is not involved", and then he proceeds to tell you that all of the parts of Airplay that are responsible for the drop in quality are involved. Specifically, a compressed video stream is created and that is sent to the SoC for decompression. That compression/decompression cycle is responsible for the quality degradation in the video, and (presumably) the limitations on the output resolut…

AirPlay is a network protocol. There is no network here.

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

#127

Post by stcredzero »

smackfu wrote: post #118
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…

This seems like the kind of solution you would bodge together if someone gave you the already designed Lightning connector and said "now make it support VGA and HDMI". A completely crazy hack. Bashing Apple over it seems completely reasonable.

It's a result worthy of pointy haired bosses.

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

#129

Post by pohl »

objclxt wrote: post #72
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…

> defined as Apple, you know the company with the most popular open source operating system in the world? I'm not sure which OS you're talking about...perhaps you could point me to the source code of either OS X or iOS? Certain core components of OS X are open source, but Darwin isn't OS X. As someone who makes his living from writing Objective-C code, I don't have any ideological objection to Apple. But I think you…

"...Darwin isn't OS X".

Ok, but Darwin is the operating system.

I remember back in the early days – from Mach on black hardware through Openstep on 4 different architectures – the folks from NeXT were always very careful to use the phrase "system software" when referring to the whole thing and only using the phrase "operating system" when referring to the layer that supports basic functions like scheduling tasks, invoking user-space code, and controlling peripherals.

This is one of the things I appreciated of them back then, as they were respectful of the nomenclature actually used in computer science.

Now I realize that the phrase "operating system" commonly receives slight colloquial abuse to refer to everything inside the shrinkwrap, but I think the formal meaning hasn't completely died yet, so nirvana should be allowed to use it properly if he so desires.

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

#130

Post by Spykk »

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…

Are you seriously defending Apple by saying a serial bus is the obvious solution? Apple, the company that has forced rediculous proprietary ports that add zero value into its products while every one else in the space was using Universal Serial Bus? If this post was meant to be sarcastic then I will accept a well deserved whoosh, but ideology trumped engineering at Apple years ago.
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