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Apple Lightning
- person_of_color 6y agoCould Apple come after this guy since he has access to leaked IP?
- bkanber 6y agoUsually you can only go after the leaker or anyone republishing the IP. Simply having access to it isn't a crime. Perhaps they could issue some sort of takedown notice for the schematics.
- nitrogen 6y agoNot a lawyer, but I seem to remember that trade secret law in California at least covers information you know should be secret. So if I'm remembering correctly, information derived from leaked docs would be subject to trade secret law.
- mindfulhack 6y agoIANAL also, but how would it play out in practice? Provisions in law are different to what can happen in practice. Perhaps enough damage has to be proven in order for remedy to be handed down? And is it criminal violation, or just civil? And if civil, if the violation happens overseas, not much can be done in practice, right? I don't know much about American IP law.
- sigwinch28 6y agoEven though he might have not done anything illegal, of course Apple might come after him.
- Y_Y 6y ago> The information in this artcile is based on a lot of AppleInternal materials (leaked datasheets, schematics, source codes) I read in a diagonal direction. What does "diagonal direction" mean here?
- pashky 6y agoSeems like a literal translation of Russian idiom meaning “skimmed through the text”.
- bkanber 6y agoI took it to mean "unofficially and as an outsider".
- vbezhenar 6y agoIn literal Russian translation reading something in a diagonal direction (читать по диагонали) means reading quickly, without digging into it. I think proper English translation would be "to skim through".
- cpa 6y agoIt means in a cursory manner. edit: funny to see all that we all replied at the same time. Just to add to the conversation, "diagonal reading" is not just a Russian idiom, it also exists in French :)
- dirkt 6y agoIn German it's "querlesen" (read s.th. transversely, read s.th. across). I guess Russian and French people start top left and stop bottom right, while Germans start top center and end bottom center ... (at least that's what I do).
- leipert 6y agoIn German we say „einen Text Überfliegen“ - fly over a Text. Funnily a „Überflieger“ is a person who excels at something, maybe with low effort.
- userbinator 6y agoI bet most of the information in this article was already known by others, mostly in the repair as well as the 3rd-party accessories businesses, and either wasn't publicised or was not in English. I still remember the announcement in a Chinese BBS a long time ago when the first company in Shenzhen cracked the protocol --- a few weeks after Apple started using Lightning. Apple seems to like using 1-wire buses; here's another application of one: http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-magsafe.html http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-ma...
- saagarjha 6y agoRight, this seems to be mostly reverse-engineered personally. I am sure that the people replicating debug cables have a fairly good idea of what’s going on inside of them.
- mindfulhack 6y agoYou're not wrong about your information, but interestingly your criticism parallels that commonly levelled against Apple itself - that Apple's innovation was "was already [achieved] by others". However, it wasn't yet presented in a nice, easy to consume package all in one place - which is sometimes just as significant as the raw engineering itself. It's testament to the noteworthiness of both Apple and this article that here we are talking about it all - about efforts cobbled together from other parts.
- mobilio 6y agoThis explain why you can't charge iPhone with "cheap cables".
- JadeNB 6y agoThis is way over my head, though fascinating, but I wanted to see if I could understand what part explains it. Is it the "Power Handshakes" part?
- peruvian 6y agoThe only third party brand I trust is Anker.
- vuln 6y agoSame. I’ve had few issues with anker and when I do they always send out a replacement immediately. Anker is worth the cost and still cheaper / sturdier than OEM.
- covercash 6y agoSomeone once commented here on HN that Apple engineering departments get boxes of Anker cables delivered all the time since they’re so much better than Apple’s own. I wish I had saved the link.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThis is hardly surprising when you consider that Apple's business is selling a phone, where they generally have to throw in a cable so people can charge it, and Anker's business is selling a cable that you decide to buy even though you already had the one Apple gave you for "free". Apple could make a better cable, but it's not worth it to do so.
- pryce 6y agoIt sounds nice at first glance, but I don't think this argument holds up to scrutiny, because it could just as well equally apply to "companies other than Anker" manufacturing cables of this type, and the quality of a great many of those cables is almost notoriously terrible.
- haunter 6y ago>slave Pull requests intensify
- jchw 6y agoInteresting. > To enable full current, 0x74 request must be issued by Tristar and processed by HiFive. For SecureROM/iBoot that's enough I wonder if that means, in a pinch, you could turn off the device to use an uncertified charger that iOS would block.
- vxNsr 6y agoUnlikely, even if you shut the device down when you attach a charger it goes into either a semi-on state or just turns on entirely. Even if you shut it down while it’s plugged in.
- jchw 6y agoI thought the “semi-on” state with the battery display was still just firmware and not full iOS. If not, what exactly is it booting to display that? Surely not an ordinary kernel?
- userbinator 6y agoMy experience is with the MTK platform but Apple may be similar; in which case the battery display is done by neither "firmware" nor the full OS, but an intermediate component: http://www.lieberbiber.de/2015/07/05/mediatek-details-little-kernel/ http://www.lieberbiber.de/2015/07/05/mediatek-details-little...
- saagarjha 6y agoI believe they are just one of the things you can "boot", alongside regular iBoot in the boot partition and loaded appropriately by SecureROM. I'm pretty sure the images at least ship inside IPSWs.
- londons_explore 6y agoThis is correct. That's because the "Charging" screen also sometimes has OEM or carrier branding on, and error messages that might need to be i18n translated eg. "battery failure", "overheat". It's much easier to do that with a separate component rather than give every OEM the ability to flash and recompile firmware.
- max937 6y agoThis cable is clearly superior to USB-C. Why can't they make USB-C easier to plug in and reversible?
- bkanber 6y agoAre you perhaps referring to mini USB? USB-C is already reversible.
- Dahoon 6y agoIs this a joke? USB-C is reversible.
- mmastrac 6y agoFirst of all, Apple was a contributing member to the USB-C group. [1] Second of all, it is reversible (?) It's inferior to USB-C in at least two ways: 1. The part that wears out is inside the phone in Lightning and inside the cable in USB-C 2. Lightning is for the most part USB 2.0 capable (though there is a newer USB 3.0 version - unsure how many devices/accessories support that). [1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/ https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/
- ThatPlayer 6y agoMy biggest issue with Lightning is that it doesn't support HDMI over the cable. iPhones (and iPads) transmit an encoded stream to the Lighting to HDMI adapters which then gets decoded and converted to HDMI by a chip in the adapter. It adds encoding artifacts and latency.
- kalleboo 6y agoAnd it also makes the adapter more expensive and fragile (they can overheat and kill themselves)
- vxNsr 6y ago> 1. The part that wears out is inside the phone in Lightning How is this mitigated in usb-c? As in how do they prevent the inside of usb-c from wearing out?
- floatingatoll 6y ago"Don't fry if you can't re-buy". It seems necessary to point out here that if you fry your iOS device's circuitry experimenting with this stuff, when they capture the device to analyze what happened, you will likely end up paying for those repairs.
- wyxuan 6y agoiOS is pretty stringent on power capacity coming through the wires. You'd have to make your own jailbreak tweak (or modify a current one) to fry your device with a cable
- floatingatoll 6y ago"Don't brick" doesn't have the same rhyme to it. For example: Since there's a process for altering on-connector data, exercising that process could break a device in a way that disqualifies it for warranty repair.
- peterburkimsher 6y agoI think to myself that DFU mode actually stands for "Don't F Up" rather than "Device Firmware Upgrade".
- macintux 6y agoWhen I supported them I referred to it as “done f’d” instead, since it was typically used to recover from something gone wrong.
- dokem 6y agoI fried the audio in my iPod Touch 2nd gen in high school trying to build an external battery charger. I took it back to BestBuy and just said it stopped working. He updated the software, checked the water damage marker, then gave me a new one.
- 6y ago
- exabrial 6y agoWe'll probably never see USB-C from Apple because of the intense effort that went into the NIH Syndrome to come up with this connector
- shreddit 6y agoWell, the ipad pro and some MacBooks have USB Type C...
- djrogers 6y agoAll MacBooks have USB-C, and have for nearly 5 years.
- thebruce87m 6y agoWell the alternative at the time was USB 3 Micro B. If you haven’t seen that connector then I suggest you google it for a laugh. Personally I’m glad Apple picked a robust, reversible connector and stuck with it.
- banana_giraffe 6y agoUSB 3 Micro B was always funny to me. It's backwards compatible with USB 2 Micro connectors, so in theory it's a nice upgrade path at the time. In practice, though, it's often used for USB HDDs, and often those drives couldn't function reliably with the power levels of a USB 2 connection, so using them with a USB 2 micro connector was not only much slower, but they'd just power down randomly. I like lightning connector, but it too has it's silly hacks. The HDMI dongles are an amazing level of silliness, down to a slimmed down iOS image being copied to the dongle and run there to enable a h264 decoder to run on the dongle itself. It works, kinda sorta.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoWait, really? Do you have more information on the HDMI dongle? I'd read a whole novel about that.
- crazygringo 6y agoI'm curious -- what's the reason for something seemingly as simple as a Lightning cable to have chips inside of it? For most of computing history, I was generally under the impression that cables were "dumb" -- each pin connects to a wire which connects to a pin on the other end. There's fancy bundling and twisting and whatever involved, but it's still ultimately just conductive wires. When did cables start getting chips, and why? Did Apple start it or somebody else? Is it solely to try to prevent third-party manufacturers? Is it for the cable to announce to the port that it supports certain specifications of power or data? (But why would that require a chip instead of just some kind of "dumb" extra pin that has some basic electrical property that can be read?) Is it something else? I mean I understand why certain dongles have chips, because they're connecting between sets of pins that aren't 1-1 or even in the same data format at all. Or why the same might be true for USB-C to Lightning. But for cables to go from "dumb" to "smart" seems like it kind of breaks all expectations of what a cable even does, and therefore how a consumer will even know what to purchase -- which, of course, has famously been a HUGE issue with USB-C. Would it be better for us to go back to dumb cables without chips? Or are there good reasons why this is the future, where at some point we'll expect all computer cables to have them?
- userbinator 6y agoIs it solely to try to prevent third-party manufacturers? Is it for the cable to announce to the port that it supports certain specifications of power or data? (But why would that require a chip instead of just some kind of "dumb" extra pin that has some basic electrical property that can be read?) Is it something else? My theory is that it started as the former and then they realised it would seem less suspicious and more friendly to also use it for the latter.
- nikanj 6y agoIn a nutshell, the answer is that the Lightning cables just seem simple, but they're not.
- mmastrac 6y agoLightning added chips that weren't necessary IMO. You don't need smart control over the low voltages/power that go over a lightning cable. Lightning chips were likely more about control. USB-C _does_ require e-marked cables in certain cases where passing large amounts of power over a thin cable could be dangerous. I don't believe these chips are proprietary nor expensive - just marking silicon that replaced the old resistor system that was somewhat brittle and often wrong.
- saagarjha 6y ago> Many Lightning accessories I've played with have mirrored pinouts in their connectors And some, like the “chimp” cables mentioned later, do actually care which direction you plug them in :)
- specialist 6y agoI love Lightning, long wished it'd conquer all, and expected to hate USB-C. I kinda like USB-C. I now half expect Apple's future mobile devices to not have any ports, will just use wireless charging. Apple AirPods are already pretty amazing. I haven't used any plugin headphones 6+ months. Not even my beloved Shure; which sound fantastic, but hot damn I hate cables.
- lostlogin 6y ago> I now half expect Apple's future mobile devices to not have any ports, will just use wireless charging. Wonder where my pocket lint will accumulate if that happens.
- gumby 6y agoI love that the protocol uses the string “BREAK”. Old teletypes, and in particular the iconic ASR-33 had a key marked “BREAK” that was not a character; it simply held the line open. This could be interpreted by the person on the other end as a sign to reset what was going on and start again, or really anything that might have been pre-agreed. With the advent of computing, and connecting teletypes to computers, it was often used to trigger an NMI. Multics and the rainbow books cited it as a way to make sure you were talking to the “real computer and not some program impersonating your computer (since it wasn’t an actual character there was no way for a normal program to even see it much less generate it. The terminal controller/channel controller could see it though and notify the monitor (what we call the “kernel” these days).
- TickleSteve 6y agoUARTs and serial protocols are still in very widespread use. A large proportion of all embedded devices use them, which is arguably the majority of all computing systems sold. What you're implying is historical is still current.
- gumby 6y agoYep, and I know that UARTS still have built in break detection but keyboards don’t have a BREAK key, or any rainbow book style “secure key to signal the computer” function any more. Even the power switches on Mac laptops (and I assume others), phones etc are soft functions. I haven’t designed an embedded device or serial protocol that used break since, well, ever. That’s why I was tickled to see this. Edit: just saw your uname — my use of the term “tickled” was coincidental
- egwor 6y agoDoes anyone know what the black box is that he's connecting to in the picture? Is that the logic analyser or just some other accessory?
- zxcvgm 6y agolooks like the DSLogic: https://www.dreamsourcelab.com/product/dslogic-series/ https://www.dreamsourcelab.com/product/dslogic-series/
- jyriand 6y agoI wonder how many iPhone’s have been thrown away because it’s “not charging anymore”. I have had two occasions where my iPhone was not charging and i went to buy a new one, luckily both times shop assistants cleaned the socket, pulled out all the dust balls etc and it was charging again.
- oxymoron 6y agoI carry a tooth pick for this, but it’s annoying. I’m in the process of switching out my main charging stations for Qi so I don’t have to bother with it...