[snogglethorpe]

Wait, why does Apple even have the power to do this...?

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...?!?

[guptaneil]

There's a digital chip within the connector that authenticates the cable and routes the signals to the appropriate pins. This is what they license.

[snogglethorpe]

Wait, so.... DRM in the cable?

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...

[veemjeem]

Well, it's not really drm -- the chip in there is used for lots of stuff. There was an article about the thunderbolt cable (which has a similar design to lightning) where it has a chip inside that cable as well. Note that thunderbolt was actually designed by intel.

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.

[Dylan16807]

There are various sane reasons to have a chip in there to process data.

There is no benign reason to involve authentication to shove 5V over the wire.

[zb]

The pins are on the outside of the connector. It's trivial to short-circuit them by accident, which could easily cause a fire if there were not a chip in there to control when you "shove 5V over the wire".

[Dylan16807]

So it has to act as a relay. That's easy enough. Is the spec of how this chip works at all open or is it a DRM method with an excuse?

[josteink]

Well, it's not really drm

Except that now nobody can make a cable/connector without Apple giving them permission first.

Sure sounds like DRM to me.

[catch23]

Doesn't DRM stand for digital rights management? I think you may have confused it with something else. DRM doesn't prevent people from manufacturing cables -- it's to prevent the end user from accessing content they don't own. DRM was never aimed as a way to reduce the number of manufacturers out there. In fact, DRM wanted to increase the number of manufacturers so that there would be less hardware that could play media that you didn't buy (pirated content).

[josteink]

DRM prevents digital data/signals from going where an end-user wants them to. So you cannot play DRMed media on a open-source player, but only players blessed by the DRM-vendor. The end-user has his choices artificially limited.

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.

[snogglethorpe]

Soooo, sort of "DRM with plausible deniability"... ><

[marshray]

So the device will refuse to charge from a simple regulated supply?

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

[marshray]

I haven't seen the connector myself, but I would not expect it to be devoid of all innovation. But I do find it somewhat disturbing that after 100+ years we're still finding patentable modifications to ordinary low-voltage plugs.

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.

[JohnTHaller]

You can't. Apple built DRM into their cable with a proprietary security chip. All DRMed and patended up nicely to lock everyone out of just about everything.

[czhiddy]

A minimal amount of googling would've uncovered the actual purpose of the chip: http://brockerhoff.net/blog/2012/09/23/boom-pins/

Care to provide any sources describing the DRM capabilities?

[marshray]

From your link, the discussion doesn't seem to have a definitive conclusion:

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.

[marshray]

Bastards. Well, as long as someone has a cable somewhere that your DC supply can proxy communications to...

[dlitz]

More people need to ask this kind of question.