It's a connector... Why on earth is it possible to patent a connector that doesn't involve any particular innovation (take wires, rearrange a bit, tweak shell shape) in the first place...?!?
Someone should make a Kickstarter for a compatible charging connector that unambiguously avoids all the patents. Something dirt-simple like just a few bare metal pins sticking out providing voltage and alignment.
Now that would be disrupting the ecosystem.
Care to provide any sources describing the DRM capabilities?
The folks at Chipworks has done a more professional teardown, revealing that the connector contains, as expected, a couple of power-switching/regulating chips, as well as a previously unknown TI BQ2025 chip, which appears to contain a small amount of EPROM and implements some additional logic, power-switching, and TI’s SDQ serial signalling interface. SDQ also uses CRC checking on the message packets, so a CRC generator would be on the chip. Somewhat confusingly, Chipworks refer to CRC as a “security feature”, perhaps trying to tie into the authentication angle, but of course any serial protocol has some sort of CRC checking just to discard packets corrupted by noise.
So until someone finds a truly dumb Lightning charging cable, the question as to whether or not DRM prevents it is alive.
I remember rolling my eyes a bit when people complained about the new connector, but man, this thing actually is starting to sound kind of evil...
I think lots of future cables will have these chips in them. In thunderbolt, the chip mutiplexes & demultiplexes the data. Perhaps the idea is that speed increases can be had just by upgrading your cable instead of upgrading the port.
In the lightning cable, the chip is also responsible for determining the orientation of your connection, since the connector is reversible.
Except that now nobody can make a cable/connector without Apple giving them permission first.
Sure sounds like DRM to me.
And now the end-user cannot use any cables he likes. Only those cables blessed by the proprietary connector vendor. You have authentication where none is needed, exclusively to give the vendor power, not to provide the end-user with benefits.
Both are about digital data/signals and having artificial restrictions imposed on them. I think the similarities are good enough to warrant the name DRM.
If there are more adopters of lightpeak, there will be other cable manufacturers, and users can buy any cable they want. People who don't understand electronics also wouldn't understand how this might benefit the user.
Personally, I think lightpeak is a fairly interesting way of implementing something, it enables ports to be a lot more capable without having to replace electronics on the motherboard.
Perhaps users who don't fully understand what is going on inside would prefer to think that it's something evil...
There is no benign reason to involve authentication to shove 5V over the wire.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.