29 ms·

(Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design

209 points by dmishe 14y ago

dmishe 14y ago
I think the main takeaway is that yes, lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to. I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cycle was in the first place though.
- revelation 14y ago
  He doesn't say, but probably because they just don't have the bandwidth. And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf. New interfaces will only have more bandwidth, thats the whole point. Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth and theres still a considerable penalty in serializing any other interface. If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future.
  - taligent 14y ago
    I might be really confused but why is Apple going to be in deeper trouble ? Surely the future will be H.265 content which will have better quality for the same bandwidth. And it's unlikely that people are going to be demanding a higher output resolution than 1080p from their mobile device for anytime soon.
    - revelation 14y ago
      Again, this is a connector from your mobile device to a display. Nobody has ever done any lossy compression on that pathway; both because you can drive simple circuits at frequencies high enough to have plenty of bandwidth and because it would actively destroy information (hence lossy). This is such a big problem because the video you are playing has already been lossy compressed (H.265) and it will most certainly not get better by a second pass that only has the raw pixel data available. I could imagine people want to play 4k movies from their mobile device on their TV, but you wouldn't install a 4k screen as the display on the mobile device. Edit: Yes, computer is inaccurate. I wanted to get the idea across that we are talking about connectors (DVI, HDMI) that you would normally use to hook up a computer or laptop to a TV or LCD. They have only recently appeared on mobile devices, but serve the same purpose here: video (and audio, for HDMI) out.
      - mbell 14y ago
        > Again, this is a connector from your computer to a display. Huh? Its the plug on the bottom of a phone (and ipads now i guess). Lightning isn't on any computers.
      - taligent 14y ago
        a) This is a connector from a mobile device to a TV. That is the primary use case here. I doubt anybody is hooking up an iPhone to any other type of display. b) Why is there a second pass compression/decompression stage ? Isn't iOS outputting the compressed H.264 stream and the adapter decoding it i.e. one stage ? c) Given that Retina displays by definition are the best resolution we will need and it is far less than 4K it is questionable whether there will be a use for 4K on mobile devices. Other than using your iOS device as a media player for your TV (very small use case).
      - dmishe 14y ago
        I think that if you have a 1080p source on your phone, it goes to tv as 1080 and without another compression step, it's only mirroring that reduces the resolution (which, for ipad mini, is less than 1080p btw) and introduces compression pass
        justincormack 14y ago
        rescaling does not mean you need to do compression.
  - gilgoomesh 14y ago
    Do you mean the future where we're streaming 4k video? If HEVC (aka H.265) lives up to its promise, 4k video will come in around a mere 50% more than 1080p does now. Meanwhile, lossless 1080p would require 20000% more space (no I didn't add too many zeros, that's 200 times more).
    - FireBeyond 14y ago
      A mere fifty per cent more than something that Lightning already can't handle...
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - gilgoomesh 14y ago
        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.
        dmishe 14y ago
        How is that estimation done, I'm very curious?
        makomk 14y ago
        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.
        giovannibajo1 14y ago
  - glitch 14y ago
    So, you're saying bandwidth increase while maintaining backwards compatibility won't be possible through the Lightning interface? Surely, USB 1.0 to USB 2.0 demonstrated a counter-example to your statement.
    - jacquesm 14y ago
      Notice the 2.0 there?
      - glitch 14y ago
        Yes, and? Lightning 2.0. Sure. That doesn't mean the physical interface changes. That doesn't mean there isn't backwards compatibility. That doesn't mean there isn't forwards compatibility. "And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf" argument made no statements to support itself. "Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth" is like saying "Meanwhile, USB still has the same bandwidth with USB 2.0 as it did with USB 1.0". There will be higher bandwidth Lightning 2.0 peripherals with Lightning 2.0 devices; but Lightning 1.0 peripherals will still be compatible. The Lightning interface doesn't establish some sort of permanent bandwidth cap to its future backwards-compatible revisions.
  - mbell 14y ago
    > If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future. Unencoded video is about the most bandwidth intensive thing I can imagine coming out of or going into a phone, and will remain so for a long time. 1080p30 @ 24bit is roughly 1.5 Gbit/sec before you talk about transport level ecoding (8b/10b) or audio.
    - dmishe 14y ago
      But then there's 4K, if we're talking about future proofing. Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way?
      - mbell 14y ago
        > Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way? Based on what has come out about lightning it appears to have 2 differential data channels (same as USB2). There will be some upper limit on frequency but its impossible to know without detailed specs. Its also not clear if one is locked as send and one as receive, or if they are configurable, there is an ancillary control channel so anything seems possible. For comparison, HDMI has 3 data channels, each with raw bit rate of up to 3.4Gbit/sec (~2.7Gbit/sec data).
    - revelation 14y ago
      And HDMI does it effortlessly. That's exactly what these interfaces were designed to do: raw massive data with low latency over short distances, suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs.
      - mbell 14y ago
        > suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs. Your splitting hairs. Pretty much all HDMI transmitter ICs have a microcontroller on board, they need a processor to deal with the protocol configuration, DDC and HDCP. Probably most are using some 8051 design plunked into the chip. They are SoCs by any reasonable definition.
  - drewcrawford 14y ago
    > 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 when connect your lightning-USB cable to your iPhone, your iPhone squawks and says "What is this?" and the cable says "I'm USB". The iPhone then sets its pinout to USB mode and off you go. What's so great about this, why not just use USB? I think the secret sauce is that Apple wants to surreptitiously invent new pinouts with faster data rates, without consulting any standards bodies and having to rally industry support on TVs, computers, et al. They just build some new controller to push Lightning at 2Gbps+, put it in new iPhones, and build active cables that spit out HDMI or UHDTV or USB3 or whatever it is the kids are doing these days. The active cables degrade gracefully for hardware running at the slower data rate. What I think you are seeing right now, is the dry run with the off-the-shelf controller. Get manufacturing ramped up. You need this to plug your phone into a computer anyway. But it's just the tick. Wait for the tock. Now the only thing that puzzles me is why they settled on 8 pins, when USB3 is 9. Obviously they wanted an even number so you could plug it in every which way, but you would think stepping up to 10 pins would let them use off-the-shelf USB3 controllers instead of USB2. Maybe they can do USB3 on 8-pins somehow, or maybe the tock will be ready fast enough that it's not worth it. Further reading: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/ http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/
    - dmishe 14y ago
      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_)?
      - taligent 14y ago
        Why wouldn't they use H.264 and their existing hardware ? Do you really think it makes more sense to decode H.264 on the device then re-encode it in another format and then decode that on the adapter ? Sounds slow, illogical and bound to introduce more artifacts.
- bitcartel 14y ago
  I think the main takeaway is, why pay for a $50 widget when a $5 cable will do the job? For the consumer who just wants to connect their device to a HDTV, it's crazy they have to pay 10x more just because they're in the Apple ecosystem and not Android. As for being future-proof, by the time some cool new A/V interface hits the market, and we've all updated our TVs, the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum.
  - taligent 14y ago
    You know you can buy Lightning cables off eBay for $5. And that the original dock connector first appeared in the iPod 3G nearly a decade ago. So yes today's devices will be in a museum. But the connector could still be in use in 2023 and beyond. Worth keeping in mind.
    - bitcartel 14y ago
      Yes, you can get a Lightning to USB cable for charging and syncing for $5, but to connect to a TV you need to get the Lightning AV adapter which costs $50.
    - esolyt 14y ago
      Can you buy Lightning to HDMI adapters off eBay for $5? Because I can buy MicroUSB (MHL) to HDMI adapters for $5.
  - dmishe 14y ago
    >the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum. Why? They'll plug another $50 adapter on it and it'll work.
    - signed0 14y ago
      I think they meant that the by the time successor to HDMI is invented today's smartphones will be obsolete.
      - bitcartel 14y ago
- HNLogInShit 14y ago
  "lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to" Uh, no. It can't even deliver HD resolution video. In fact, it can't deliver shitty degraded video riddled with compression artifacts at HD resolution. How is that "future proof"? It's not even up to present-day standards. But keep shilling for Apple.
- StringyBob 14y ago
  The interesting point to me is that a device can be future proof through iOS updates - i.e. for as long as apple is prepared to create software drivers/updates to support the peripheral. Obsolescence is now almost entirely a software rather than hardware problem. Features can be added or removed via updates. Firmware loaded at runtime is not new (see many of the wifi/bluetooth dongles that don't work in linux). However, would apple let 3rd party peripherals download driver code? I wouldn't have thought they want to keep baking it into iOS itself as the number of peripherals increase. Perhaps drivers embedded in a controller app via the app store? I like the idea that with a thunderbolt<->lightning adapter (and a huge amount of hacking) iOS peripherals are a blank canvas and could be used with other non apple devices or for purposes never originally intended (that VGA card as a software radio transmitter springs to mind...)
batgaijin 14y ago
Lightning is an Intel feature that Apple is trying to support right? I mean I can't tell if they firmly support this or if since Intel is there only chip supplier they are kind of bound to supporting this.
- lunixbochs 14y ago
  You're thinking about Thunderbolt?
  - glitch 14y ago
    Yes, he/she is thinking about Thunderbolt.
- glasshead969 14y ago
  No, lightning is a proprietary apple connector technology which looks like borrows same concept from thunderbolt which is intel's next generation connector.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
noonespecial 14y ago
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 then runs a daemon in a most familiar fashion. I can think of a few delightful applications off hand. There will be some epic hacks. Is there like a "Bunnie" signal?
- nirvana 14y ago
  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 "crippled" the device by not giving it USB and how this "proves" Apple just wants "control" and why did they have to jailbreak it anyway? In the process of getting their panties all bundled up they never realize they're bitching about an adapter not being a general computing platform. They're also proving Apple right-- it's engineered to solve a specific problem and provide specific functionality. Even if it were jailbroken from the factory, people would be complaining and demanding that it does other things... than what it was designed to do.
  - lobster_johnson 14y ago
    You're extrapolating everything into a very silly future-tense strawman that won't ever exist. Nobody will be complaining that Apple didn't put USB in a proprietary SoC intended for video transfer.
  - larrys 14y ago
    "And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled"" Exactly. "Dozens". Apple isn't building products for "dozens". They are building for the people who literally stream into the Apple retail store (non techies who clamor for their products) at all times of the day when other stores sit idle. I can walk into the Apple store near me (and it's not in Manhattan but in a suburban mall) and while the other upscale shops are idle, say, Tuesday at 10am the Apple store is quite busy.
buro9 14y ago
It's a strange day when we move from cables that work perfectly well to cables that need to be software upgradeable to work as well.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >It's a strange day when we move from cables that work perfectly well to cables that need to be software upgradeable to work as well. Yes, it's a strange day when we move from "cables that work perfectly well BUT the device with the ports they connect to has to be replaced whenever a new technology cames along" to "cables that need to be software upgradable but are far more future proof and capable all the while freeing the device from those concerns".
  - buro9 14y ago
    That is a problem entirely of our own making. The stereo beside me has components that span 30 years and uses the same cabling for all components. I realise someone will come back with "Oh, but DRM, encryption, needing more information about the source and destination"... but I'd counter by pointing out that telecoms cabling works perfectly well for transporting all kinds of things across it. You can put into protocols the things that you need, without having to create hardware problems that require constantly replaced and software upgradeable cabling.
    - scott_karana 14y ago
      While I sympathize, this isn't just about A/V standards. This allows for absolutely ANYTHING, barring bandwidth concerns. Ubiquitous body computers with skin access ports? We can make an interface for that. "Quantum broadcast" antenna technology? We can make a dongle for that.
      - buro9 14y ago
        Which is precisely why I gave the example of cabling for telecommunications.
sylvinus 14y ago
I am now patiently waiting for this cable to be jailbroken!
cake 14y ago
Man, a computer in a cable seems like such a waste and complex design. What's the point of doing so ? I don't get it.
- HNLogInShit 14y ago
  It's more Apple detachment from the real world. There's no excuse for this shit. The point of updating the dock connector was presumably to MODERNIZE it, with a real DisplayPort or (better) Thunderbolt connector. Come to find out that it's a piece of shit that can't even deliver clean video. And all of that pales in comparison to the blunder of not having audio line out in the port anymore. Now that every audio manufacturer has RE-added auxiliary inputs to car stereos, clock radios, and boom boxes... Apple REMOVES the output that feeds them. And this is on devices that are media players first, phones second. PATHETIC.
- fredsted 14y ago
  Sorry, but did you read the comment?
  - XorNot 14y ago
    It still doesn't make any sense. "Here's a world standard which is being built into literally every display on the planet, and is signal compatible with many others" (i.e. HDMI/Displayport/DVI). And for some reason they're worried about some new standard being incompatible and not being able to upconvert? The exact same logic would apply if the devices had native display connectors, and then eventually needed some new connector for it. If you can't get a raw framebuffer or HDMI over your current link, you're never going to get a new faster/bigger protocol over it either.
    - glasshead969 14y ago
      This isn't just about video, the design helps to keep pin smaller and removes the need to having dedicated combination of pins to support a certain standard which may not be used anymore. For example, old 30 pin connected had support for FireWire which is no longer user anymore but connecter still needed to have those pins. I think they know the issue of video quality and are working to fix that. The beauty of this design is they can improve the hardware/software to push data efficiently because it just needs to output data stream it's upto the cable to handle it. As Moore's law kicks in, cables would need smaller chips. They no longer have to keep changing pin configuration to add support to newer connectors. The Cables will handle that in the software.
nirvana 14y ago
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 dedicated lines for analog and dedicated lines for digital in a world where people want HDMI adapters for a connector that originally had firewire signals on it, from a time before HDMI was even common. But this is Apple, so the REAL reality distortion field kicked in-- a tsunami of press acting as if Apple was ripping people off with a $30 adapter, hundreds of mindless conspiracy theories from Apple bashers on Hacker News about how this is to have more control over people and how this once again proves that "open" (defined as google, not actually anything to do with openness) is better than "closed" (defined as Apple, you know the company with the most popular open source operating system in the world?). It's one thing to not know enough engineering for this to have been obvious to you, it's quite another to spread lies and engineering ignorance as a result of your ideological hatred of Apple. And the latter is basically all I saw on HN about this format. (Which is one of the reasons I write HN off as worthless for months at a time.)
- mcintyre1994 14y ago
  I agree with what you're saying, but I'm interested about Apple's open source operating system. Assuming OS X, I'm having trouble finding its entirety in open source, obviously it's built on open source but I don't think the entire OS is open sourced. I'm also having trouble believing it wouldn't have been used for a Linux desktop by now. Sorry for replying to a small part of your comment, but I really do agree with the rest.
- objclxt 14y ago
  > 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 shouldn't accuse people of spreading "lies and engineering ignorance" when you seem to be claiming something that's patently untrue.
glasshead969 14y ago
This takes a page from intel thunderbolt which uses active cables too. Initially thunderbolt cables were costly for this same reason but as chips become cheaper and smaller, cost would not be a issue while you still have advantage of a adaptive interface.
rossjudson 14y ago
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 resolution. "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. What makes this actively hostile to the customer is Apple's proprietary adapter design. If there was a real, competitive, standardized market for the various adapters, on balance it would be a good deal. But there isn't. Magsafe is nice, but if you have any of a number of common problems with your Air's power supply/cable, you are in for an $80 charge to buy a new one. Even if the only thing wrong with it is pin spring that's worth pennies. Because Lightning is coupled to proprietary decoders and Apple patents, it's customer-hostile. And, as we've seen here, the result has poor quality. If the quality was high, then we might be able to overlook it. We shouldn't.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- lucian1900 14y ago
  AirPlay is a network protocol. There is no network here.
  - rossjudson 14y ago
    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.
- Cushman 14y ago
  > "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.
lttlrck 14y ago
It all seems liks a fairly logical progression from the company that brought us Firewire. If you don't like it instead of whining, vote with your wallet. Personally I believe this is a smart move and we'll see far more exciting things running on this interface in future. Plus myriad related patents.
runjake 14y ago
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 technology in question.
- smackfu 14y ago
  "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.
djanogo 14y ago
Sounds like "Wireplay" for devices which don't support "Airplay".
supervillain 14y ago
So it's a winmodem for HDMI.
DenisM 14y ago
I think we can all agree that pushing hdmi circuitry off the iPhone reduces cost of the device, increases cost of the dongle, and drops signal quality. We can also speculate that signal quality will increase over time by a combination of better encoding, pass through for already encoded signal, and raw speed upgrade for lightning protocol itself. What is puzzling is the timing of the release. There is an obvious drop in quality, and no obvious reason to save cost in iPhone 5. They could have let the technology mature to quality parity and only then release it, so what gives? My theory is that Apple came under serious price pressure, as cheap smartphones are now the fastest growing segment of the market, and so they are preparing to ship a very cheap version of the iPhone. Given their position as high-margin company on one hand and pressure from low-margin competition on another, they felt the need to pinch every penny. And so the iPhone 5 ended up being the test bed for the new wave technology with much lower cost of entry, but more expensive accessories. Unfortunately, what we get in the interim are both expensive devices and expensive peripherals.

209 points by dmishe 14y ago

I think the main takeaway is that yes, lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to. I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cycle was in the first place though.

revelation 14y ago
He doesn't say, but probably because they just don't have the bandwidth. And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf. New interfaces will only have more bandwidth, thats the whole point. Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth and theres still a considerable penalty in serializing any other interface. If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future.
- taligent 14y ago
  I might be really confused but why is Apple going to be in deeper trouble ? Surely the future will be H.265 content which will have better quality for the same bandwidth. And it's unlikely that people are going to be demanding a higher output resolution than 1080p from their mobile device for anytime soon.
  - revelation 14y ago
    Again, this is a connector from your mobile device to a display. Nobody has ever done any lossy compression on that pathway; both because you can drive simple circuits at frequencies high enough to have plenty of bandwidth and because it would actively destroy information (hence lossy). This is such a big problem because the video you are playing has already been lossy compressed (H.265) and it will most certainly not get better by a second pass that only has the raw pixel data available. I could imagine people want to play 4k movies from their mobile device on their TV, but you wouldn't install a 4k screen as the display on the mobile device. Edit: Yes, computer is inaccurate. I wanted to get the idea across that we are talking about connectors (DVI, HDMI) that you would normally use to hook up a computer or laptop to a TV or LCD. They have only recently appeared on mobile devices, but serve the same purpose here: video (and audio, for HDMI) out.
    - mbell 14y ago
      > Again, this is a connector from your computer to a display. Huh? Its the plug on the bottom of a phone (and ipads now i guess). Lightning isn't on any computers.
    - taligent 14y ago
      a) This is a connector from a mobile device to a TV. That is the primary use case here. I doubt anybody is hooking up an iPhone to any other type of display. b) Why is there a second pass compression/decompression stage ? Isn't iOS outputting the compressed H.264 stream and the adapter decoding it i.e. one stage ? c) Given that Retina displays by definition are the best resolution we will need and it is far less than 4K it is questionable whether there will be a use for 4K on mobile devices. Other than using your iOS device as a media player for your TV (very small use case).
    - dmishe 14y ago
      I think that if you have a 1080p source on your phone, it goes to tv as 1080 and without another compression step, it's only mirroring that reduces the resolution (which, for ipad mini, is less than 1080p btw) and introduces compression pass
      - justincormack 14y ago
        rescaling does not mean you need to do compression.
- gilgoomesh 14y ago
  Do you mean the future where we're streaming 4k video? If HEVC (aka H.265) lives up to its promise, 4k video will come in around a mere 50% more than 1080p does now. Meanwhile, lossless 1080p would require 20000% more space (no I didn't add too many zeros, that's 200 times more).
  - FireBeyond 14y ago
    A mere fifty per cent more than something that Lightning already can't handle...
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - gilgoomesh 14y ago
      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.
      - dmishe 14y ago
        How is that estimation done, I'm very curious?
      - makomk 14y ago
        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.
        giovannibajo1 14y ago
- glitch 14y ago
  So, you're saying bandwidth increase while maintaining backwards compatibility won't be possible through the Lightning interface? Surely, USB 1.0 to USB 2.0 demonstrated a counter-example to your statement.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Notice the 2.0 there?
    - glitch 14y ago
      Yes, and? Lightning 2.0. Sure. That doesn't mean the physical interface changes. That doesn't mean there isn't backwards compatibility. That doesn't mean there isn't forwards compatibility. "And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf" argument made no statements to support itself. "Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth" is like saying "Meanwhile, USB still has the same bandwidth with USB 2.0 as it did with USB 1.0". There will be higher bandwidth Lightning 2.0 peripherals with Lightning 2.0 devices; but Lightning 1.0 peripherals will still be compatible. The Lightning interface doesn't establish some sort of permanent bandwidth cap to its future backwards-compatible revisions.
- mbell 14y ago
  > If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future. Unencoded video is about the most bandwidth intensive thing I can imagine coming out of or going into a phone, and will remain so for a long time. 1080p30 @ 24bit is roughly 1.5 Gbit/sec before you talk about transport level ecoding (8b/10b) or audio.
  - dmishe 14y ago
    But then there's 4K, if we're talking about future proofing. Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way?
    - mbell 14y ago
      > Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way? Based on what has come out about lightning it appears to have 2 differential data channels (same as USB2). There will be some upper limit on frequency but its impossible to know without detailed specs. Its also not clear if one is locked as send and one as receive, or if they are configurable, there is an ancillary control channel so anything seems possible. For comparison, HDMI has 3 data channels, each with raw bit rate of up to 3.4Gbit/sec (~2.7Gbit/sec data).
  - revelation 14y ago
    And HDMI does it effortlessly. That's exactly what these interfaces were designed to do: raw massive data with low latency over short distances, suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs.
    - mbell 14y ago
      > suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs. Your splitting hairs. Pretty much all HDMI transmitter ICs have a microcontroller on board, they need a processor to deal with the protocol configuration, DDC and HDCP. Probably most are using some 8051 design plunked into the chip. They are SoCs by any reasonable definition.
- drewcrawford 14y ago
  > 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 when connect your lightning-USB cable to your iPhone, your iPhone squawks and says "What is this?" and the cable says "I'm USB". The iPhone then sets its pinout to USB mode and off you go. What's so great about this, why not just use USB? I think the secret sauce is that Apple wants to surreptitiously invent new pinouts with faster data rates, without consulting any standards bodies and having to rally industry support on TVs, computers, et al. They just build some new controller to push Lightning at 2Gbps+, put it in new iPhones, and build active cables that spit out HDMI or UHDTV or USB3 or whatever it is the kids are doing these days. The active cables degrade gracefully for hardware running at the slower data rate. What I think you are seeing right now, is the dry run with the off-the-shelf controller. Get manufacturing ramped up. You need this to plug your phone into a computer anyway. But it's just the tick. Wait for the tock. Now the only thing that puzzles me is why they settled on 8 pins, when USB3 is 9. Obviously they wanted an even number so you could plug it in every which way, but you would think stepping up to 10 pins would let them use off-the-shelf USB3 controllers instead of USB2. Maybe they can do USB3 on 8-pins somehow, or maybe the tock will be ready fast enough that it's not worth it. Further reading: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/ http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/
  - dmishe 14y ago
    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_)?
    - taligent 14y ago
      Why wouldn't they use H.264 and their existing hardware ? Do you really think it makes more sense to decode H.264 on the device then re-encode it in another format and then decode that on the adapter ? Sounds slow, illogical and bound to introduce more artifacts.
bitcartel 14y ago
I think the main takeaway is, why pay for a $50 widget when a $5 cable will do the job? For the consumer who just wants to connect their device to a HDTV, it's crazy they have to pay 10x more just because they're in the Apple ecosystem and not Android. As for being future-proof, by the time some cool new A/V interface hits the market, and we've all updated our TVs, the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum.
- taligent 14y ago
  You know you can buy Lightning cables off eBay for $5. And that the original dock connector first appeared in the iPod 3G nearly a decade ago. So yes today's devices will be in a museum. But the connector could still be in use in 2023 and beyond. Worth keeping in mind.
  - bitcartel 14y ago
    Yes, you can get a Lightning to USB cable for charging and syncing for $5, but to connect to a TV you need to get the Lightning AV adapter which costs $50.
  - esolyt 14y ago
    Can you buy Lightning to HDMI adapters off eBay for $5? Because I can buy MicroUSB (MHL) to HDMI adapters for $5.
- dmishe 14y ago
  >the Lightning devices of today will be in a museum. Why? They'll plug another $50 adapter on it and it'll work.
  - signed0 14y ago
    I think they meant that the by the time successor to HDMI is invented today's smartphones will be obsolete.
    - bitcartel 14y ago
HNLogInShit 14y ago
"lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to" Uh, no. It can't even deliver HD resolution video. In fact, it can't deliver shitty degraded video riddled with compression artifacts at HD resolution. How is that "future proof"? It's not even up to present-day standards. But keep shilling for Apple.
StringyBob 14y ago
The interesting point to me is that a device can be future proof through iOS updates - i.e. for as long as apple is prepared to create software drivers/updates to support the peripheral. Obsolescence is now almost entirely a software rather than hardware problem. Features can be added or removed via updates. Firmware loaded at runtime is not new (see many of the wifi/bluetooth dongles that don't work in linux). However, would apple let 3rd party peripherals download driver code? I wouldn't have thought they want to keep baking it into iOS itself as the number of peripherals increase. Perhaps drivers embedded in a controller app via the app store? I like the idea that with a thunderbolt<->lightning adapter (and a huge amount of hacking) iOS peripherals are a blank canvas and could be used with other non apple devices or for purposes never originally intended (that VGA card as a software radio transmitter springs to mind...)

batgaijin 14y ago

Lightning is an Intel feature that Apple is trying to support right? I mean I can't tell if they firmly support this or if since Intel is there only chip supplier they are kind of bound to supporting this.

lunixbochs 14y ago
You're thinking about Thunderbolt?
- glitch 14y ago
  Yes, he/she is thinking about Thunderbolt.
glasshead969 14y ago
No, lightning is a proprietary apple connector technology which looks like borrows same concept from thunderbolt which is intel's next generation connector.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

noonespecial 14y ago

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 then runs a daemon in a most familiar fashion. I can think of a few delightful applications off hand. There will be some epic hacks. Is there like a "Bunnie" signal?

nirvana 14y ago
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 "crippled" the device by not giving it USB and how this "proves" Apple just wants "control" and why did they have to jailbreak it anyway? In the process of getting their panties all bundled up they never realize they're bitching about an adapter not being a general computing platform. They're also proving Apple right-- it's engineered to solve a specific problem and provide specific functionality. Even if it were jailbroken from the factory, people would be complaining and demanding that it does other things... than what it was designed to do.
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  You're extrapolating everything into a very silly future-tense strawman that won't ever exist. Nobody will be complaining that Apple didn't put USB in a proprietary SoC intended for video transfer.
- larrys 14y ago
  "And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled"" Exactly. "Dozens". Apple isn't building products for "dozens". They are building for the people who literally stream into the Apple retail store (non techies who clamor for their products) at all times of the day when other stores sit idle. I can walk into the Apple store near me (and it's not in Manhattan but in a suburban mall) and while the other upscale shops are idle, say, Tuesday at 10am the Apple store is quite busy.

buro9 14y ago

It's a strange day when we move from cables that work perfectly well to cables that need to be software upgradeable to work as well.

coldtea 14y ago
>It's a strange day when we move from cables that work perfectly well to cables that need to be software upgradeable to work as well. Yes, it's a strange day when we move from "cables that work perfectly well BUT the device with the ports they connect to has to be replaced whenever a new technology cames along" to "cables that need to be software upgradable but are far more future proof and capable all the while freeing the device from those concerns".
- buro9 14y ago
  That is a problem entirely of our own making. The stereo beside me has components that span 30 years and uses the same cabling for all components. I realise someone will come back with "Oh, but DRM, encryption, needing more information about the source and destination"... but I'd counter by pointing out that telecoms cabling works perfectly well for transporting all kinds of things across it. You can put into protocols the things that you need, without having to create hardware problems that require constantly replaced and software upgradeable cabling.
  - scott_karana 14y ago
    While I sympathize, this isn't just about A/V standards. This allows for absolutely ANYTHING, barring bandwidth concerns. Ubiquitous body computers with skin access ports? We can make an interface for that. "Quantum broadcast" antenna technology? We can make a dongle for that.
    - buro9 14y ago
      Which is precisely why I gave the example of cabling for telecommunications.

sylvinus 14y ago

I am now patiently waiting for this cable to be jailbroken!

cake 14y ago

Man, a computer in a cable seems like such a waste and complex design. What's the point of doing so ? I don't get it.

HNLogInShit 14y ago
It's more Apple detachment from the real world. There's no excuse for this shit. The point of updating the dock connector was presumably to MODERNIZE it, with a real DisplayPort or (better) Thunderbolt connector. Come to find out that it's a piece of shit that can't even deliver clean video. And all of that pales in comparison to the blunder of not having audio line out in the port anymore. Now that every audio manufacturer has RE-added auxiliary inputs to car stereos, clock radios, and boom boxes... Apple REMOVES the output that feeds them. And this is on devices that are media players first, phones second. PATHETIC.
fredsted 14y ago
Sorry, but did you read the comment?
- XorNot 14y ago
  It still doesn't make any sense. "Here's a world standard which is being built into literally every display on the planet, and is signal compatible with many others" (i.e. HDMI/Displayport/DVI). And for some reason they're worried about some new standard being incompatible and not being able to upconvert? The exact same logic would apply if the devices had native display connectors, and then eventually needed some new connector for it. If you can't get a raw framebuffer or HDMI over your current link, you're never going to get a new faster/bigger protocol over it either.
  - glasshead969 14y ago
    This isn't just about video, the design helps to keep pin smaller and removes the need to having dedicated combination of pins to support a certain standard which may not be used anymore. For example, old 30 pin connected had support for FireWire which is no longer user anymore but connecter still needed to have those pins. I think they know the issue of video quality and are working to fix that. The beauty of this design is they can improve the hardware/software to push data efficiently because it just needs to output data stream it's upto the cable to handle it. As Moore's law kicks in, cables would need smaller chips. They no longer have to keep changing pin configuration to add support to newer connectors. The Cables will handle that in the software.

nirvana 14y ago

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 dedicated lines for analog and dedicated lines for digital in a world where people want HDMI adapters for a connector that originally had firewire signals on it, from a time before HDMI was even common. But this is Apple, so the REAL reality distortion field kicked in-- a tsunami of press acting as if Apple was ripping people off with a $30 adapter, hundreds of mindless conspiracy theories from Apple bashers on Hacker News about how this is to have more control over people and how this once again proves that "open" (defined as google, not actually anything to do with openness) is better than "closed" (defined as Apple, you know the company with the most popular open source operating system in the world?). It's one thing to not know enough engineering for this to have been obvious to you, it's quite another to spread lies and engineering ignorance as a result of your ideological hatred of Apple. And the latter is basically all I saw on HN about this format. (Which is one of the reasons I write HN off as worthless for months at a time.)

mcintyre1994 14y ago
I agree with what you're saying, but I'm interested about Apple's open source operating system. Assuming OS X, I'm having trouble finding its entirety in open source, obviously it's built on open source but I don't think the entire OS is open sourced. I'm also having trouble believing it wouldn't have been used for a Linux desktop by now. Sorry for replying to a small part of your comment, but I really do agree with the rest.
objclxt 14y ago
> 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 shouldn't accuse people of spreading "lies and engineering ignorance" when you seem to be claiming something that's patently untrue.

glasshead969 14y ago

This takes a page from intel thunderbolt which uses active cables too. Initially thunderbolt cables were costly for this same reason but as chips become cheaper and smaller, cost would not be a issue while you still have advantage of a adaptive interface.

rossjudson 14y ago

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 resolution. "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. What makes this actively hostile to the customer is Apple's proprietary adapter design. If there was a real, competitive, standardized market for the various adapters, on balance it would be a good deal. But there isn't. Magsafe is nice, but if you have any of a number of common problems with your Air's power supply/cable, you are in for an $80 charge to buy a new one. Even if the only thing wrong with it is pin spring that's worth pennies. Because Lightning is coupled to proprietary decoders and Apple patents, it's customer-hostile. And, as we've seen here, the result has poor quality. If the quality was high, then we might be able to overlook it. We shouldn't.

deleted 14y ago
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lucian1900 14y ago
AirPlay is a network protocol. There is no network here.
- rossjudson 14y ago
  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.
Cushman 14y ago
> "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.

lttlrck 14y ago

It all seems liks a fairly logical progression from the company that brought us Firewire. If you don't like it instead of whining, vote with your wallet. Personally I believe this is a smart move and we'll see far more exciting things running on this interface in future. Plus myriad related patents.

runjake 14y ago

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 technology in question.

smackfu 14y ago
"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.

djanogo 14y ago

Sounds like "Wireplay" for devices which don't support "Airplay".

supervillain 14y ago

So it's a winmodem for HDMI.

DenisM 14y ago

I think we can all agree that pushing hdmi circuitry off the iPhone reduces cost of the device, increases cost of the dongle, and drops signal quality. We can also speculate that signal quality will increase over time by a combination of better encoding, pass through for already encoded signal, and raw speed upgrade for lightning protocol itself. What is puzzling is the timing of the release. There is an obvious drop in quality, and no obvious reason to save cost in iPhone 5. They could have let the technology mature to quality parity and only then release it, so what gives? My theory is that Apple came under serious price pressure, as cheap smartphones are now the fastest growing segment of the market, and so they are preparing to ship a very cheap version of the iPhone. Given their position as high-margin company on one hand and pressure from low-margin competition on another, they felt the need to pinch every penny. And so the iPhone 5 ended up being the test bed for the new wave technology with much lower cost of entry, but more expensive accessories. Unfortunately, what we get in the interim are both expensive devices and expensive peripherals.