(Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by YooLi » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 6:18 PM UTC

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 is the operating system. Trying to point out that the whole system stack is considered not open source because the windowing system isn't open has nothing to do with it. Does my Ubuntu system become not open source when I use the binary nvidia drivers?

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

#132

Post by Cushman » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 6:24 PM UTC

pavanky wrote: post #53

Cushman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seriously ? All the arguments about Apple products "just working" and being "premium products", now change to "only people who need the feature have to pay for it" ?

I don't understand how those ideas are contradictory at all.

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

#133

Post by Cushman » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 6:31 PM UTC

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…

> "We didn't do this to screw the customer". Sure you did. You have offloaded the cost of a parallel connection, necessary for HDMI, to the adapter. Almost every competing system comes with HDMI built-in. 30 pin connectors could drive HDMI. Lightning can't without having another whole computer in the adapter.

So every competing product charges every single user, most of whom will never use it, for HDMI output. Apple charges (more, to be fair) only those users who need the feature.

How this gets interpreted as "screwing the customer" baffles.

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

#134

Post by CountSessine » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 6:33 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #114

ecopoesis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Modern_ HDMI supports ARC, 3D and Ethernet. The early versions didn't, and you have to upgrade components to get the functionality. Apple is solving a real problem here: next time the HDMI consortium adds another random feature to their bus, Apple can just ship a new adapter that will work with all Lightning devices since none of the HDMI hardware is in the phone.

Since when did Apple care about not having to replace your iPhone?

Since they decided to issue OS updates to existing owners?

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

#135

Post by rlanday » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 6:36 PM UTC

Spykk wrote: post #130

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.

You do realize that it was Apple that first shipped computers with USB to replace legacy ports, right?

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

#136

Post by Cushman » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 6:36 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #114

ecopoesis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Modern_ HDMI supports ARC, 3D and Ethernet. The early versions didn't, and you have to upgrade components to get the functionality. Apple is solving a real problem here: next time the HDMI consortium adds another random feature to their bus, Apple can just ship a new adapter that will work with all Lightning devices since none of the HDMI hardware is in the phone.

Since when did Apple care about not having to replace your iPhone?

Apple still sells millions of iPhone 4(S)s every month. I'd say they care about it to the tune of a few billion dollars.

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

#137

Post by dfox » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 6:48 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

The protocol certainly is not same and not exactly backward compatible. 1000-Base-T is fairly complex interface that is more similar to S(H)DSL than to traditional ethernet over TP or even anything that would any sane person call "baseband interface". By the way this is the reason that SFP/GBIC to 1000-Base-T transceivers are not supported by all devices with relevant slot, are not exactly compatible between manufacturers and sometimes are not compatible with non-gigabit devices on other end of the link (ie. not backward-compatible on the RJ45 side of things).

And before than in the days of first fast ethernet implementations there also were incompatibilities of similar type, which is mostly the reason that every managed or even "smart" switch allows you to disable auto negotiation quite prominently in it's configuration interface. Although that was more about software issues than about interoperable implementation being non-practical as is to some extent the case with copper SFP modules.

Bottom line: "I don't know what the next network interface will look like, but it will be called Ethernet and use RJ45 connectors on CatN (for some value of N) twisted pair ..."

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

#138

Post by dfox » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 7:02 PM UTC

dmishe wrote: post #33

drewcrawford wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future. Let me try and shed some light on this mystery. Consider this rumor. Also, I am not an electrical engineer, so I may be talking out of my ass. As best as I can tell, Lightning is not (yet, anyway) a real protocol like Firewire, USB, etc. What it is so far is USB with a different connector and some negotiating chips. So w…

Yep, and the comment about them using already existent h264 support in hardware I think supports dry-run-fastest-to-deadline solution. Re pins, I'm not EE either, but I don't get why people concern about number of pins so much, as I asked earlier in this thread, is there a relation between number of pins and bandwidth (well with physics involved there is _some_)?

There is pretty significant relation between number of pins and prices of almost every piece of hardware involved. IC package price is almost linearly dependent on number of it's pins and for most mass-manufactured chips packaging is major component of final price. Also wide parallel interfaces are harder to design from interference perspective and to route on PCBs. General shift to essentially serial interfaces for almost everything except main memory is motivated by simple fact that trading silicon area used by serialization/deserialization logic for less device pins, simpler boards and simpler system design is very worthwhile whenever it's at least partially possible. For very slow interfaces it has been this way for at least 30 years, since mid 90's for slow system buses (that's why around 2000 motherboards stopped having ISA slots, ISA was replaced by serial LPC interface around that time) and since early 00's for almost everything in non-specialist applications.

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

#139

Post by naner » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 7:03 PM UTC

hosay123 wrote: post #73

objclxt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Perhaps you didn't experience the PR storm around the time OS X was initially released: it was heavily geared towards nerds and the literal phrase "open source" was extensively employed in their marketing material. This aside, you're basically trying to write off nirvana's (IMHO excellent) rant using a minor technicality, one of the common features of the discussions here that tends to make my skin crawl.

you're basically trying to write off nirvana's (IMHO excellent) rant using a minor technicality

He's not trying to write anything off and it is a pretty big technicality. nirvana should have omitted that ideological jab to begin with as it was unnecessary and shows his bias for Apple/against Google. Google is more "open source" than Apple in any way that matters, considering Android is currently on devices their competitors (Amazon) are selling. Apple is mostly responsible for WebKit which is commendable and useful but as far as practical considerations go, nobody gives two shits about Darwin.

But yes, engineering should be the focus and people assume the worst with Apple.

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

#140

Post by Spykk » Sun, Mar 03, 2013, 7:38 PM UTC

rlanday wrote: post #135

Spykk wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do realize that it was Apple that first shipped computers with USB to replace legacy ports, right?

USB was around long before Apple stopped providing PS/2.

If you buy a phone or tablet from anyone that isn't Apple you will very likely get a USB port. If you buy Apple you will not. Trying to argue that Apple is somehow looking to the future by providing a serial bus years after it was the norm is hard to comprehend.