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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

#161

Post by rossjudson »

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…

The point here is that the electrical design of Lightning doesn't have the bandwidth for 1080p. It runs at USB 2 speeds.

Software can't magically make hardware do things. It can create an illusion (like the Lightning adapter does), but the design has to support, for real, capabilities you want to properly provide.

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

#162

Post by rossjudson »

lucian1900 wrote: post #126
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.

Yes, yes, of course you are right. Except for the hardware video codecs that are necessary to make it work. A protocol requires a combination of software and hardware that can execute its specification.

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

#163

Post by rossjudson »

Cushman wrote: post #133
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…

You are easily baffled, then. Apple doesn't just change the connector design. It also performs authentication/identification/verification on the objects it is connecting to.

If you're Apple and you want to make lots of money from your very popular products, one of the ways you can do that is to make them incompatible with the competitive markets for standardized accessories. You can come up with your own connectors, and you can use patents, litigation, and trade secrets to ensure that you have no competition, and that your users have no choice but to buy high profit accessories from a single source.

I trust you are unbaffled!

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

#164

Post by nivla »

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?

I think you are wrong about that. Apple shipped the iMac starting with USB v1.1 in 1998 [1]. It was the first Mac with a USB port. USB was developed in 1994 from a group of seven companies Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. [2] Windows 95 that was released in 1997 had built-in support for USB devices.[3] The market share of Mac at that time was about 4.6% [4]. So no Apple wasn't the first computer to ship with USB support nor was it the reason USB went mainstream.

[1]http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac_ab.htm...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#History

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Editions

[4] http://pctimeline.info/windows/win1997.htm

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

#165

Post by rustynails77 »

naner wrote: post #139
hosay123 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

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

Some people sometimes assume the worst of Apple, or Microsoft or Google, or [insert name of company here]. One of the things that can cause strong anti-Apple sentiment are the rabid fanboys (ie. postings like Nirvana's). They paint Apple to be patron saints - and when reality hits (like it did for me with antenna-gate), users are annoyed because of the unrealistic expectations, but also because of the RDF created by Fanboys. For the record, I think Apple have shown the phone industry a thing or two about engineering excellent products while maintaining a strong focus and excellent compromises. I just wish the rabid Fanboys would shut up, or present a balanced view ... it would make Apple a lot easier to respect.

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

#166

Post by Cushman »

rossjudson wrote: post #163
Cushman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

You are easily baffled, then. Apple doesn't just change the connector design. It also performs authentication/identification/verification on the objects it is connecting to. If you're Apple and you want to make lots of money from your very popular products, one of the ways you can do that is to make them incompatible with the competitive markets for standardized accessories. You can come up with your own connectors,…

If I'm Apple, I don't need to come up with some kind of trick to make lots of money. I just need to keep releasing best-in-class hardware at competitive prices by leaving out expensive features 99% of my customers will never want.

I love my iPhone 5, not because of patents or lawsuits, but because it's really, really well built. I definitely couldn't have gotten it cheaper from anyone else. How many overpriced accessories have I bought? Zero. Because I don't need that crap-- and Apple doesn't make me pay for stuff I don't need.[0]

[0] Not counting the Mac Pro, that is.

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

#167

Post by teamonkey »

CountSessine wrote: post #134
teamonkey wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Since they decided to issue OS updates to existing owners?

Those with original iPhones, 3G, 3GS or original iPads no longer get updates.

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

#168

Post by rlanday »

nivla wrote: post #164
rlanday wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you are wrong about that. Apple shipped the iMac starting with USB v1.1 in 1998 [1]. It was the first Mac with a USB port. USB was developed in 1994 from a group of seven companies Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. [2] Windows 95 that was released in 1997 had built-in support for USB devices.[3] The market share of Mac at that time was about 4.6% [4]. So no Apple wasn't the first computer to…

Wikipedia says:

“Few USB devices made it to market until USB 1.1, released in August 1998, which fixed problems identified in 1.0, mostly relating to hubs. 1.1 was the earliest revision to be widely adopted.”

The iMac G3 was released in August 1998. I didn’t say the iMac was the first computer to have USB ports, because it probably wasn’t quite the first (although, interestingly, no other computer comes up when you try to Google this); importantly, though, it only had USB ports, and killed off ADB, serial, parallel, and SCSI, forcing users to start buying USB peripherals. My family had to get a serial to USB adapter that still worked with OS X the last time I tried it with a GPS receiver (I just looked it up and it may have finally stopped working with Mountain Lion, nearly 15 years later). It was, what, about ten years after that that most PCs finally stopped including PS/2, serial, and parallel ports?

There’s some discussion here with people disputing that the iMac “jumpstarted” the USB market: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2785/did-apple-j...

Someone complains that Apple promoted FireWire and was late to support USB 2.0, but FireWire came out first and was technically superior (although some devices do have weird compatibility issues), and that Apple dragged its feet supporting USB 3.0 because they were trying to promote Thunderbolt, but I believe this was because Apple is using Intel chipsets (because Intel killed off Nvidia’s chipsets) and Intel was doing exactly what this person accused Apple of doing.

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

#169

Post by lostlogin »

mikeash wrote: post #144
jws wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. I don't even have a device with the connector (yet?), but it seems like a major advantage. Who are all these people popping out of the woodwork wanting a wired connection from their phone to their TV? I'm sure some people do this sometimes, but so many? Why would you even do that? Perhaps this is uncharitable, but it makes me think that most of the people complaining here have never done it, never will, prob…

Probably the same people who want VGA as it what the corporate world use.

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

#170

Post by aoetr »

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 kidding?

The issue is that the idiots at Apple failed to create a connector (or at least add a secondary connector for video) with enough bandwidth to even drive a single low-end 1080p display (and what about 2560x1600, 3D at 120/240Hz, 4K, multiple 4K configurations?!?).

So, they had use H.264 compression and sell a ludicrously expensive adapter with a CPU, destroying the signal, introducing latency and effectively defrauding their consumers who thought they would get arbitrary and direct HDMI output like you would expect from any reasonable system.

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