(Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design
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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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
For the record each of these has a purpose and reason. Some were a function of the materials present at the time others due to specific environmental concerns. I would not class any in the realm of "lock-in". Due to the capital intensive nature of the industry they each were good business decisions at the time. It wasn't as easy as buying a $40 plug.
If there weren't the huge installed base of wires in the walls of buildings, we probably would have different standards for patch cables instead of fairly obscenely complex network interfaces.
But with lightning you can design cables which need not use device computing power for all transformations, it is pretty smart, they built this cable for the next decade we will see interesting applications from apple and its partners in coming years
And before than in the days of first fast ethernet implementations there also were incompatibilities of similar type, which is mostly the reason that every managed or even "smart" switch allows you to disable auto negotiation quite prominently in it's configuration interface. Although that was more about software issues than about interoperable implementation being non-practical as is to some extent the case with copper SFP modules.
Bottom line: "I don't know what the next network interface will look like, but it will be called Ethernet and use RJ45 connectors on CatN (for some value of N) twisted pair ..."
Aren't all problems in computing this way?
>The stereo beside me has components that span 30 years and uses the same cabling for all components.
Yes. And it does just one thing. Output analog electrically encoded sound signals.
Now, call me again when that stereo cabling has to also support: audio out, digital audio out, video out, different resolutions, MIDI out, connecting to medical and scientific devices for control, charging, data backup and sync, ethernet, etc etc...
>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.
Only because there is a computer in the other (either an actual PC or a TV, etc) that knows what to expect and how to decode it and show it.
In this case, the computer is inside the cable, so the connected devices don't have to know everything.
All Apple is doing is proprietary lock-in here - it's not more flexible in anyway, where as HDMI is signal compatible with DVI and DisplayPort.
Personally, I'm waiting for software-upgradable domestic light switches and mains plugs. Then we're in trouble ...
"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.
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.
If you're Apple and you want to make lots of money from your very popular products, one of the ways you can do that is to make them incompatible with the competitive markets for standardized accessories. You can come up with your own connectors, and you can use patents, litigation, and trade secrets to ensure that you have no competition, and that your users have no choice but to buy high profit accessories from a single source.
I trust you are unbaffled!
I love my iPhone 5, not because of patents or lawsuits, but because it's really, really well built. I definitely couldn't have gotten it cheaper from anyone else. How many overpriced accessories have I bought? Zero. Because I don't need that crap-- and Apple doesn't make me pay for stuff I don't need.[0]
[0] Not counting the Mac Pro, that is.
I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cycle was in the first place though.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The rest of this is ancillary stuff. They aren't decoding h.264 on an ARM core, that's impossible for any significant bit rate, they are doing it with a purpose built bit of hardware, just as the HDMI encoding is done in a purpose built bit of hardware. Incidentally the encoding of HDMI is a mess, the spec is worth a read some time.
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.
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.
Huh? Its the plug on the bottom of a phone (and ipads now i guess). Lightning isn't on any computers.
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).
Meanwhile, lossless 1080p would require 20000% more space (no I didn't add too many zeros, that's 200 times more).
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.
It says nothing about Lightning maximum speed. Besides, whatever maximum speed can be measured with today hw, it doesn't mean that can be pushed tomorrow with different HW in the iDevice.
Besides, if we're talking about hypothetical future hardware, there's nothing to stop someone doing the same with micro-USB. (In fact, manufacturers already have in the form of MHL.)
Of course dual link DVI et al can do more than 1080p. They are all huge. Apple's needs to support not just today's thin devices but those for the next decade (iWatch ?).
DVI, HDMI and MHL all require custom hardware in the device. As the Apple engineer said, Apple are trying to avoid this.
Avoiding custom hardware in devices just seems ridiculous - to support new standards Apple are either going to have to update their chips or update their devices, and they will have to update the cables too. There's not a saving here that isn't achieved by simply using an existing standard.
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/
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_)?
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.
It seems to me they had a system for outputting video via h.264, and they decided to use it again here. Seems like a reasonable decision at that point.
Traditionally it's been easier for most hardware makers to double the pin counts than to build controllers that run at twice the clock rate and also make everybody use fancy cables. But traditionally not everybody has PA Semi across the hall to build chips for you and years of experience selling $50 cables to consumers via direct retail. So I'm betting that the usual economics of the consumer data interface market don't apply to Apple.
With serial techniques such as differential encoding parallel transmission off circuit board has been obsolete for a long time. The potential skew between the pins is too great and synchronisation too complex.
How so? A center pin is still the center pin when you flip it around. Odd pin counts work fine.
Is the metal prong itself the 9th pin?
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.
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.
Why? They'll plug another $50 adapter on it and it'll work.
And economy of scale does work. I do not think Apple can seriously undercut Samsung because they managed to leave out a HDMI chip.
I think Apple's reason for this connector is more one of aesthetics: why have X > 1 chips that can communicate with the outside world and, typically, X connectors? Full wireless is not yet an option, so they need one. Then, they need some way to figure out what is on the other end of the line.
Why they didn't pick USB3, I don't know. Not proprietary enough? Connectors too bulky? Low power spec not (yet) available? Not flexible enough? Supports too many devices? (If you put an USB connector in, people will expect that it works with their hard disk, photo camera, keyboard, mouse, etc)
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...)
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.
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.
What's the point of doing so ? I don't get it.
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.
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.
If you need a custom cable no matter what, then why not support a common standard - which is a standard and thus common to many devices - and then adapt it as necessary?
Instead you have this situation: you've got a proprietary standard which can't handle a common standard well in the first place (evidenced by the fact they made a compromise to make it work). It'd make sense if there was a lack of pins or something, but it doesn't - between USB and HDMI/DP there's every type of signalling you would need to support newer standards within the realms of the existing hardware.
It's Apple ecosystem lock in and that's it, but in this case its a worse outcome.
They're not going to be reprogramming iOS devices for faster bitrates - that means an IC change in the device. It also means an IC change in the cable. And at the end of the day still means...less capability then using standards would have.
I am not sure the assumption that it would need a new chip is true. It may be a firmware issue that can be fixed in a software update.
>> It'd make sense if there was a lack of pins or something, but it doesn't - between USB and HDMI/DP there's every type of signalling you would need to support newer standards within the realms of the existing hardware.
Within in realm of existing hardware is the key point. 30 pin connector was used for 10 years. In those 10 years there has been huge change in Standards used and adopted. I would assume Apple has similar plans for Lightning.
Also USB and HDMI is not a perfect standard as you seem to imply. The docking port on iDevices is used for many other things including things which haven't been invented yet.
Standards like Micro USB 2 are non starters for Apple. With only 5 pins: +5V, Ground, 2 digital data pins, and a sense pin,most of the dock connector functions wouldn’t work – only charging and syncing would. Micro USB 3 is capable but Larger than Lightening. Also implementing Micro USB 3 would require a Chip on the host and also handle USB protocol on processor using precious PCB space. Also implementing HDMI on Micro USB needs a special convertor chip.
Also many devices break USB spec for allowed power to charge their devices. iPad with retina display, despite going over limits takes forever to charge. On lightening, device can multiplex all 8 pins to charge the device.
I agree with your point of controlling the peripheral market. This isn't as much of a compromise as what would needed to be done in case of Micro USB. MHL does same thing for Micro USB where a separate controller chip on the cable repurpose signals to HDMI while USB is off.
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.)
Sorry for replying to a small part of your comment, but I really do agree with the rest.
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.
This aside, you're basically trying to write off nirvana's (IMHO excellent) rant using a minor technicality, one of the common features of the discussions here that tends to make my skin crawl.
The central tenet was that discourse here is regularly devoid of sound engineering because it tends to be blinded by mindless cultural perceptions of the companies involved in whatever happens to be under discussion. In the case of Apple the expectation is their products are flawless and if not then all hell will be paid on blogs and comment sections everywhere.
Whether or not Darwin is or isn't open source doesn't freaking matter, it was heavily marketed as such back in the sands of time and even if this wasn't the case it doesn't invalidate the central point made in the rant - that just because this device has an Apple logo every popular discussion surrounding it turns to mindless diatribe as a result of non-engineering centric expectations people place on their products, and every engineering-centric party (i.e. hackers) must deal with the whining polluting engineering-centric forums for days every time it happens.
In effect, the complaint is that commenting resembles the squabble of a throng of uninformed consumers rather than the judicious discourse of a forum of engineers.
GNU/Linux is therefore cough nVidia cough completely, 100% open. Thanks for clearing that up. Darwin sux!1!
/sarc
He's not trying to write anything off and it is a pretty big technicality. nirvana should have omitted that ideological jab to begin with as it was unnecessary and shows his bias for Apple/against Google. Google is more "open source" than Apple in any way that matters, considering Android is currently on devices their competitors (Amazon) are selling. Apple is mostly responsible for WebKit which is commendable and useful but as far as practical considerations go, nobody gives two shits about Darwin.
But yes, engineering should be the focus and people assume the worst with Apple.
Some people sometimes assume the worst of Apple, or Microsoft or Google, or [insert name of company here]. One of the things that can cause strong anti-Apple sentiment are the rabid fanboys (ie. postings like Nirvana's). They paint Apple to be patron saints - and when reality hits (like it did for me with antenna-gate), users are annoyed because of the unrealistic expectations, but also because of the RDF created by Fanboys. For the record, I think Apple have shown the phone industry a thing or two about engineering excellent products while maintaining a strong focus and excellent compromises. I just wish the rabid Fanboys would shut up, or present a balanced view ... it would make Apple a lot easier to respect.
Ok, but Darwin is the operating system.
I remember back in the early days – from Mach on black hardware through Openstep on 4 different architectures – the folks from NeXT were always very careful to use the phrase "system software" when referring to the whole thing and only using the phrase "operating system" when referring to the layer that supports basic functions like scheduling tasks, invoking user-space code, and controlling peripherals.
This is one of the things I appreciated of them back then, as they were respectful of the nomenclature actually used in computer science.
Now I realize that the phrase "operating system" commonly receives slight colloquial abuse to refer to everything inside the shrinkwrap, but I think the formal meaning hasn't completely died yet, so nirvana should be allowed to use it properly if he so desires.
Be wary of confirmation bias and sample set bias (you only hear the worthless noise from those who are speaking it) when reading sites like HN/Reddit/etc.
It's a lot easier to hit the upvote button than it is to type a comment. Not all of HN's constituents are whiny blowhards.
Exactly. It turned out Apple's Lightning is actually inferior to a standard MicroUSB + MHL.
standard, you say?
and in what way do you believe (MicroUSB + MHL) is 'standard'?
Serious questions.
Also most MHL adapters seem to do 1080p - the Lightning one seems to do 720p badly if we are to believe Apple store reviewers.
In this specific case the quality is bad, operation is unreliable, and the price is high. Consumer devices accept HDMI as input. Serial to parallel video (Lightning to HDMI) is tough without some heavy-duty hardware -- hence the exorbitant cost of these adapters.
The SoC design introduces a massive amount of complexity. This has yielded unreliable operation. And it introduces that complexity at a point of physical vulnerability -- people don't treat adapter like tiny fragile computers. They treat them like, well, adapters.
End-to-end serial communications would be nice, but that's not the world we live in.
Lightning isn't that much smaller than HDMI or Micro-HDMI. Reversibility is a very minor feature, and not worth the price being paid.
And that's not a $30 adapter. It's a $50 adapter. Did you think it was $30? That was the old one -- parallel to parallel.
Non-symmetrical connectors are an affront to usability.
In 2074 days of owning an iPhone and 1065 days of owning an iPad I have never used or wanted an HDMI output.
I'd say they made the right tradeoff.
Who are all these people popping out of the woodwork wanting a wired connection from their phone to their TV? I'm sure some people do this sometimes, but so many? Why would you even do that? Perhaps this is uncharitable, but it makes me think that most of the people complaining here have never done it, never will, probably never even thought about doing it before, but are now outraged at the thought that the connector is not 100% perfect for this one uncommon use-case.
Edit: third use case, hooking this up to a monitor to turn your smartphone into a desktop computer.
Now since the adapter is a SoC and it's OS is booted from the device, what that means is, every device has essentially full control over how it wants to output HDMI, without having to change the adapter or the port. Right now this is accomplished using this quirky h.264 encode/decode workaround, but this is first-gen, and it doesn't have to stay that way. Future iDevices might load a different OS onto the SoC and output lossless 1080p using the exact same adapter! And without breaking older devices.
It frees Apple from having to define a fixed method of transmitting HDMI over Lightning now, that is then set in stone for the next 10 years, and has to be supported by every future device.
It also frees them from having unnecessary pins, which might become useless in the future, but have to carry over to every new device (a.k.a. 30-pin connector). And knowing Apple, probably THE top priority of Lightning was to have a slick, easy-to-plug-in-n-out, user-friendly connector, which Lightning admittedly does way better then any MicroUSB standard.
Because in essence, the only thing that is fixed about Lightning is the physical shape and pins, so they focused on getting that aspect right and future-proof. How the data is transmitted can be changed on a device level basis.
I don't understand this. What makes these things any more fragile than a regular adapter? They are, as far as I understand it, compact, fully solid-state, and about as strong as any consumer electronics of that size would be.
I mean, technically speaking Samsung or any of the other manufacturers could've done the same trick as Apple using plain old micro-USB OTG 2.0 with no special hardware support in their phones, no special connectors... but the reviewer community would call them out on it because it's ugly and user hostile, if their engineers even let them get that far.
Good trade? No.
Maybe it's a case of I didn't complain when they came for my DEC Alpha server with green screen, nor when they took away my Token Ring network, but I will not stand for only using one flimsy cable for all my devices. Come on, this is the tech industry, what did you think was going to happen?
What I see Apple's done here is future proofed the connector. Ok, so it doesn't output 1080p today, but I see no reason why it couldn't tomorrow. Devise a new protocol, download an update to all the iDevice's which in turn upgrades all the adapters out there and everything's golden. Once this (admittedly painful) transition is complete, I see no reason for Apple to have to endure another one. By the time it's outdated, I'm sure everything will be wireless.
Perhaps everyone complaining about a $30 adapter shouldn't have purchased a $600 phone and instead stuck with a $20 Moto Razr.
Added latency and worse quality are pretty big things. I wan't to send pixels 1:1 to my display device, which this new technology doesn't allow.
Admittedly, I'm not privy to whatever design decisions the team that implemented the connector made, but I see no reason why it couldn't have the same fidelity that a straight hdmi cable would have. If I guessed, I'd say that they said 'good enough, ship it' instead of continuing to refine it since they knew they could always send down an update later.
Software can't magically make hardware do things. It can create an illusion (like the Lightning adapter does), but the design has to support, for real, capabilities you want to properly provide.
One way you could defend it is to promise features that can be programmed into the adapter firmware but if today it does 720p poorly I see no reason to believe something much more useful/better will come later. I am paying the $50 today, not in the future.
If you buy a phone or tablet from anyone that isn't Apple you will very likely get a USB port. If you buy Apple you will not. Trying to argue that Apple is somehow looking to the future by providing a serial bus years after it was the norm is hard to comprehend.
You may be thinking of the licensed Mac clones of the mid-90s: some of them did include PS/2 ports.
[1]http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac_ab.htm...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#History
“Few USB devices made it to market until USB 1.1, released in August 1998, which fixed problems identified in 1.0, mostly relating to hubs. 1.1 was the earliest revision to be widely adopted.”
The iMac G3 was released in August 1998. I didn’t say the iMac was the first computer to have USB ports, because it probably wasn’t quite the first (although, interestingly, no other computer comes up when you try to Google this); importantly, though, it only had USB ports, and killed off ADB, serial, parallel, and SCSI, forcing users to start buying USB peripherals. My family had to get a serial to USB adapter that still worked with OS X the last time I tried it with a GPS receiver (I just looked it up and it may have finally stopped working with Mountain Lion, nearly 15 years later). It was, what, about ten years after that that most PCs finally stopped including PS/2, serial, and parallel ports?
There’s some discussion here with people disputing that the iMac “jumpstarted” the USB market: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2785/did-apple-j...
Someone complains that Apple promoted FireWire and was late to support USB 2.0, but FireWire came out first and was technically superior (although some devices do have weird compatibility issues), and that Apple dragged its feet supporting USB 3.0 because they were trying to promote Thunderbolt, but I believe this was because Apple is using Intel chipsets (because Intel killed off Nvidia’s chipsets) and Intel was doing exactly what this person accused Apple of doing.
What's the win from an engineering standpoint here? And why is this an inevitable design (which you suggest if I understand you right)? What are some other options and what are the reasons those might not have been used?