Apple's Lightning authentication chip may have been reverse engineered - Page 2

Since the invention doesn't require you "dick over consumers", what's your point?

Who defines what a product sells for? The manufacturer.

Then the consumer decides whether they want to buy it or not.

It's not up to third party trolls to define the proper selling price.

I'm not buying it. (Pun intended)

It is clearly more complex than a simple power inversion depending on orientation. For a start there are 8 pins and all four pairs need to be switched. The more complex task is that the eight pins of this new connector are mapped onto (most of) the 30 pins of the old connector as needed. The lightning connector has been claimed by Apple to be all digital so the chip clearly includes a DAC. It is likely that it also interprets the analog input pins of the old connector to identify accessory type and makes different pin assignments and requests different output from the device depending on what is attached.

 

No it's not magic but you are completely overlooking most of what it's doing while assuming that there is some sort of DRM which may be the case but is which is far from certain at this point.

 

Why? Is the USB port to which it connects analog?

USB no but many other uses for the 30-pin connector are , video, audio in/out, midi.  People seem to forget that this port is not just a usb or power charger port but the I/O port for a small general purpose computing device.

A useful key that would be. I mean, anyone would mistake you for Obama open the door to his office. Especially the security.

Actually, the manufacturer defines a use for a product, but sometimes the consumer finds another use that becomes mainstream, and the manufacturer changes his stance accordingly.

You are right that USB is digital and and mapping Lightning to USB is a simpler use case. There are also Lightning to 30-pin adapters, however, which require additional complexity, including supporting analog audio out, which implies the DAC, and accessory communication. They have also announced Lightning to HDMI and Lightning to VGA so there is something interesting going on between the cable/adapter and the device to support all those use cases over 8 pins.

I honestly do not understand why people are crying and whining so much about the lightning cable's price. How many of these cables do you actually need first off? I have the one that came with my iPhone and then I went and bought a spare one for the car. It was worth $19 (I think) and I dont find that to be too much for something i will probably use for the next couple years. I just dont see the fuss about $19.

And to all the people crying and saying that Apple charging $19 while some 3rd party vendor will probably charge $5....you obviously do not understand how businesses work. Because if you did, you would be able to understand that a company as big as Apple has overhead costs, research and development costs, marketing costs, etc etc tied to these cables. While these 3rd party vendors have wayyyyy less costs than Apple.

You are aware that the Apple-stamped cables are $3 cables made in China? 

Exactly.  They may even from the same factories just stamped differently.

 

Apple does not allow their manufacturing partners to rebrand Apple’s own designed products and sell them to other companies with a different “stamp." Not true.

 

And you can’t claim Apple wouldn’t find out about it, if you claim that you found out :)

 

(Yes, Apple manufactures in China, but that does not mean all “Made in China” products are the same. Apple dictates how its products are made. I’d say it’s very legitimate to be suspicious of poor quality in a “Made in China” product that is super cheap from some mystery brand with no track record, while not having the same suspicion about an Apple product.)

According to a statement the vendor made at MacRumors they've been using the exact same chip from the same supplier that Apple uses. More recently they've tested a knock-off chip that seems to work just as well as the authentic one.

 

The examples you cite are all digital in the iDevice, carried over a digital buss to a digital device.  The computer needs to have a DAC but the cable doesn't.

 

 

 

The ADAPTER may need a DAC, but the Apple-supplied Lightning-to-USB cable doesn't.

Speaking of overpriced -- Gizmodos got a teardown of the Lighting to 30-pin adapter in case anyone is interested ...

http://gizmodo.com/5950947/first-look-at-whats-inside-apples-new-dock-adapter-its-basically-impossible-to-mod

And here's the first review --

http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipad-iphone/reviews/?reviewid=3404608


Edited by Mac_128 - 10/11/12 at 2:43pm

So much for that cable manufacturer guy who is ripping people off with sleeved standard cables, and selling them for $80 saying there is no way the Chinese can release this before xmas. That guy really promoted his business talking nonsense.