The exchange of the 30-pin connector for Lightning, promoted by Apple recently, is more than justified. Yes, many users “lost” several accessories or had to buy a Lightning adapter for 30 pins to be able to use part of them in their new gadgets (fourth generation iPad, iPad mini, iPhone 5, iPod touch and iPod nano).
But the truth is, if Apple remained using the 30-pin connector, it would be impossible to have an iPhone 5 just 7.6mm thick, an iPad mini 7.2mm and an iPod touch 6.1mm! In addition, one he brought a very positive factor: no matter the orientation of the cable, plugged in, it worked!
The novelty, however, did not bring only good things. Right at the arrival of the iPhone 5 (first gadget equipped with the Lightning connector), it was only possible to mirror a video to the television through AirPlay Mirroring, since the adapters launched by Apple until that moment did not support video output.
Then, happily, Ma launched new adapters (Lightning for VGA and Digital AV) and with that, again, it allowed users to play the video of their devices on televisions.
Working on a new video project, developer Panic is running several tests with these adapters and has discovered something very curious. The first thing that Lightning for Digital AV (the one on the right, in the image above) does not support Full HD (1080p) resolution at a maximum resolution of 1600 × 900 pixels; which is quite strange, since the old adapter can transmit the videos in 1920 × 1080 pixels.
And this, of course, influences the quality of what is transmitted, something that Panic also proved when saying that the texts shown on television come from an image of a iGadget look better using the old adapter.
After all, what is the problem with this adapter, then? With that question in mind, they decided to take an iFixit and disassembled the small adapter.
To everyone's surprise, they found an ARM chip entitled to 2GB (that is, 256MB) of RAM. The most logical explanation so far for all this is that, as Lightning does not support video output, Apple decided to put a microcomputer inside that adapter capable of sending all the information to the television via “AirPlay” (or some type of streaming in MPEG), what a kind of way to make everything work as before.
The problem, as we have seen, is that it does not work, at least not with the same quality.
(via iDownloadBlog)
Update
More on the subject and a possible explanation of why Apple put this microcomputer inside the adapter in this post.
