On the subject of adapters...
I'm sat in my 'den' at the moment. Looking around, my gaming PC has its optical audio output running through a TOSLINK-to-Headphone Optical adapter... My Mac Mini's DVI output goes through a DVI-to-HDMI adapter before it gets to my TV. The iMac G5 has a mini-DVI adapter (did people complain about that? I can't remember) running to another DVI-to-HDMI adapter... Just a bit of context
DVI seems to have certainly reached its limits. The fact that we need dual-link DVI (essentially two ports logically gaffer-taped together) to run reasonably high-res screens underscores that fact.
DisplayPort is the VESA standard. I reckon there's a more-than-good chance of it becoming standard on displays over the next few years, just like DVI and VGA before it.
Now, for whatever reason, Apple devised a mini variant of DisplayPort. Whilst we can all hypothesise on whether standard DP would've been adequate, I can't help but think that there was a good engineering reason for the mini's creation. Connector design isn't easy -- especially at that size. A whole lot of time and money had to have been spent to thoroughly test the design to ensure that it was fully compatible with the DP specs ensuring it could pass the same signals within the same tolerances and parameters as the DP standard. That's a lot of hard work.
Apple then make the fruits of that work available to all for free. And so they should: it's just a physical re-design of an existing design and protocol. Also, we should note that this is
not ADC all over again. It might look that way, but it isn't. ADC was proprietary not only in physical construction, but also in what signals it carried and how it carried them. Expensive adapters were required to combine USB, power, video and audio into the ADC format. This is
not the case for the mini DisplayPort, which is nothing more than a physical redesign of an existing VESA standard.
We'll certainly go through a rough patch until DisplayPort becomes more widespread. But we've been there before. I remember having parallel- and serial-to-USB adapters hanging off my gumdrop iMac G3 for a while. Not to mention those hours spent hunting for a decent USB keyboard to replace the Apple Pro keyboard of the era which I absolutely hated.
So, skipping forward a year or two... I can see DisplayPort monitors coming bundled with two leads - a DP-to-DP and a DP-to-miniDP -- very much how every firewire drive I've bought has come with both 6-to-6 and 6-to-4 pin leads (bless you, Sony and your iLink firewire-without-the-power malarkey).
But what about non-DP screens? Well, the DP spec seems to allow for analog and DVI streams... so surely that's just an adapter in the same manner as the DVI-to-VGA one which came with my Mac Mini... and I have one of which dropped in my laptop bag just in case. Surely I'll just bin the DVI-to-VGA adapter and drop in a miniDP-to-VGA one instead? Net gain/loss: 0.
Of course, this all depends on DisplayPort adoption. I suppose we'll see... but the industry's tended to gravitate towards simpler standards (PS/2, RS232, Centronics etc. all being absorbed by USB). With VESA defining the technical implementation of DisplayPort, its openness is ensured. Apple have contributed an additional connector form-factor (without breaking compatibility with the protocol/capabilities of DP) and made it available freely.
I'll say it again: This isn't *ADC: The Revenge.*
