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Comment by signed0 | Hacker News Reader

So instead of just going with USB3 like other phone manufacturers and having native HDMI they created their own interface that results in an a picture display with noticeable artifacts.

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The Micro USB plug is an abomination, only exceeded in horribleness by Apple’s predecessor to the Lightning plug, the Dock Connector.

Hardly anyone will use the HDMI out. Prioritizing the plug seems like the correct tradeoff to me. And make no mistake, this is what this is. It’s always about tradeoffs.

What's USB3 got to do with HDMI?

Most non-Apple smartphones have micro-USB ports for charging, and most made in the past few years also support sending an HDMI signal through this port, either via MHL [1] or SlimPort (notably, Nexus 4). All it takes is a $10 adapter cable rather than a $40 SoC transcoding things.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_High-Definition_Link#Mob...

They also have hardware in the phone to generated HDMI (although electrically modified to fit on the USB connector). Given that only a tiny percentage of people will ever plug their phone into HDMI, it makes sense to have that minority pony up $40 instead of making everyone pay an extra dollar for the hardware they will never use.

But if they cared about cutting costs they wouldn't have invented their own cable to begin with. When has Apple ever worried about making people pay for things they don't use?

I'm disappointed because Lightening was billed as the next innovation in design, but if the picture quality is worse then what's the point?

Apple has no problem making pay – but they do have a problem making people pay for stuff they don’t use. Nothing to do with costs per se, it’s more a philosophical stance.

That's already part of the soc and also most likely part of the Apple AX SOCs of the iOS devices as Apple uses PowerVR for graphics.

I'm not sure they even bothered to create their own interface. All the evidence so far is consistent with Lightning being USB 2.0 OTG plus a few extra pins for a lockout chip bundled into a proprietary connector. (More accurately, the usual multiplexed USB 2.0 and TTL serial that smartphones tend to have.)

Lightning is much more than that. It is configured thusly at the moment, it has much more potential.

But apparently it doesn't have the potential to be configured in MHL mode or something similar.

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