Panic Software recently blogged about a teardown of the Apple Lightning AV Adapter that revealed an ARM chip, 256MB of RAM, and a limited output resolution of 1600×900 but not 1080P as claimed by Apple. It is still a mystery as to why Apple included such complicated hardware in a simple digital adapter but Panic believes the adapter is outputting video by using Apple’s AirPlay protocol.
This Digital AV adapter might well be the world’s smallest Air Play supporting device but the only sad thing is that it does not support 1080p yet, the best explanation for the hardware setup is that Apple might be using Air Play technology and might be upscaling the resolution to give a processed 1080p output.
There are a lot of questions. What OS does it boot? @jmreid thinks the adapter copies over a “mini iOS” (?) from the device and boots it in a few seconds every time it’s connected, which would explain the fairly lengthy startup time for video out. Why do this crazy thing at all? All we can figure is that the small number of Lightning pins prevented them from doing raw HDMI period, and the elegance of the adapter trumped the need for traditional video out, so someone had to think seriously out of the box. Or maybe they want get as much functionality out of the iPad as possible to reduce cost and complexity.