Could the Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter be an AirPlay Receiver?
03/02/2013 08:12
The people at Panic, the developers of Coda and Transmit, decided to crack open the Apple Lightning Digital AV adapter. What they found in the adapter was quite surprising. Like the Lightning cable, it is very complicated inside. What they found on the inside wasn't just complicated connections, but they actually found a mini computer. In the mini computer they found an ARM chip and 256MB of RAM. The chip also has a SoC CPU.
Panic first started their search on this when they noticed that the quality of the picture out was not 1080p worthy. In fact the quality was 1600 x 900. 1080p is 1920 x 1080 so you can see that the quality is different. When they used the adapter they noticed some similarities to another Apple product. Limited resolution, lag, MPEG artifacts. This is all of the things you see when you are streaming something from an iOS device to an Apple TV. They got thinking and went deeper into the adapter. That's when they saw the chip.
Their hunch was right. The chip inside was in fact an AirPlay (or AirPlay-like MPEG streaming) output. As of right now we are not sure why Apple did this. If we get more information about why Apple did this we will keep you updated on the latest news.