[rossjudson]

What you're saying is true from an engineering standpoint (serial vs parallel), but has to be placed in the customer's context.

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.

[zyb09]

After thinking a little bit about it, I think this approach does make some sense and allows for more flexibility in the future. Keep in mind Lightning was likely designed to last well over a decade and will be used in many different devices.

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.

[nitrogen]

No amount of software can increase the bandwidth of a fixed-rate serial transceiver.

[makomk]

The problem isn't even serial-to-parallel - HDMI is serial based - the problem is that Apple apparently designed Lightning with insufficient bandwidth for uncompressed video, then kludged around it. Then Apple fanboys went on and on about how much more elegant it is than MHL, which has much cheaper HDMI adapters and better video quality because all the MHL adapters have to do is convert one uncompressed serial video data format to another.

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.

[rossjudson]

Thanks for the correction -- it is a bandwidth issue. Lightning has less capability than what it replaces. But hey -- it's reversible!

Good trade? No.

[TorbjornLunde]

I strongly disagree that reversibility is a small feature. Whenever Plugging the chargers to new iOS devices is effortless the same way as headphones jacks.

Non-symmetrical connectors are an affront to usability.

[jws]

I appreciate reversibility once per day.

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.

[mikeash]

I agree. I don't even have a device with the connector (yet?), but it seems like a major advantage.

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.

[derekp7]

The only two use cases I can think of is playing a video you recorded on your phone at a family gathering, or for playing Netflix on your TV without needing to hook up a Roku or similar.

Edit: third use case, hooking this up to a monitor to turn your smartphone into a desktop computer.

[woobar]

I have dock to HDMI adapter. I use it in hotels to watch movies on big screen TV. Beats the crap on cable TV every time.

[mikeash]

Thanks, that's the first use case that I could actually see using myself. Don't think it's quite enough to get me to go buy a cable, but I can see it being handy for that.

[lostlogin]

Probably the same people who want VGA as it what the corporate world use.

[rscale]

It's especially strange because if you want to do that, you can Airplay the video to the TV, and not have to deal with a cable from your phone to your TV.

[wlesieutre]

Asymmetric connectors weren't bad, it's when you have asymmetric connectors in rectangular plugs that it becomes a problem. I never tried to put FireWire 400 in backward, but USB is awful.

[mikeash]

"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."

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.