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zakki
Priced at $50 it has terrible quality.
mzkply
So... any idea why it's so bad?
rythie
The main reason is probably that 1080p30 is 1580 MBits and USB2 is only 480 MBits, so it has to do decompression.
mzkply
Can you explain why you mention USB? It's Lightning to HDMI...
[dead] LASR
It’s just bad. As a product, it’s bad. Terrible quality, compression artifacts etc.

From a design approach perspective it’s bad because, lightning has USB 2.0 bandwidth only. So they had to build an airplay server on the dongle that decodes a compressed H.264 and outputs an HDMI signal. There are better ways of doing that. One way is to actually have enough pins on the standard to support uncompressed HDMI output like USB-C

goda90
What are the motivations for putting things like Apple Secure Boot in there? It makes me wonder if they someday want to be able to say "this dongle is not Apple approved".
slindz
That would not surprise me at all.

I've experienced several third party charging cables that somehow stop working so reliably immediately after an iOS update.

Apple definitely wants as much of the pie as they can get.

jhthenerd
Don't they already do that? Apple used a chip in official and licensed lightning cables, and ones that didn't have the chip would prompt iDevices to say that the cable isn't Mfi certified.
dpflan
I think the title needs an edit: "lighting" should be "lightning".
skykooler
Thanks, I was wondering if Apple was making a competitor to Hue bulbs.
dpflan
Agreed, I was initially confused too.
sctb
Updated. Thanks!
[dead] pg_is_a_butt
Every HDMI adapter that isn't a computer is going to severely degrade performance.