Apple’s Lightning Digital AV adaptor is $59. That’s expensive. Apple’s Lightning Digital AV adaptor hooks up your iOS devices’ Lightning port to HDMI. But it lags and gives artefacts. Apple’s Lightning Digital AV adaptor actually hides a tiny computer inside in the cable… wait what? Yes.
The folks at Panic Software broke open a Lightning Digital AV adaptor because they were testing their theory about the cable setting up an AirPlay connection with the iOs device its plugged into and upscaling it to 1080p (as opposed to passing raw HDMI through the cable). What they found was that Apple had a tiny ARM chip inside the cable. That’s right, the Lightning Digital AV adaptor had a system on a chip computer inside.
Panic thinks the cable was made because the Lightning adaptor doesn’t have enough pins to handle raw HDMI period so Apple had to come up with a solution using Airplay. Fascinating. Doesn’t change the fact that the cable kind of sucks though. Read more about it at Panic’s Blog [Panic via The Next Web]