Cool.
Didn't think they'd actually attempt to force people to stream via Airplay.
Too bad AirPlay sucks for
1, high-fps and/or quick-reaction gaming
2, non-native (mp4/mov/m4v), hi-res video streaming
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Has anyone seriously ever hooked up their iPhone to a television??
A lot of us, actually.
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Apple used to be a great company making great products. Now they just seem to be greedy greedy greedy. They are clearly willing to sacrifice user-friendliness for money. I won't be buying anything from them anymore. The system updates reduce functionality rather than expanding it
In this particular case it might not be the case (albeit I too find the converters / adapters ridiculously high-priced at $30/$40 and they still aren't able to feed any kind of multimedia output to external devices).
However, looking at the history of iOS and Apple's deliberate removing functionality, it is. Just some examples:
- removing antialiasing in 2x iPhone emulation under iOS5 for iPad 1/2 and lying the previous antialiasing "was a bug"
- removing long-time audio recording from the 3G when the 3GS was released
- reducing the iPad 1 USB power not to allow people use external hardware except for the CCK in iOS4 etc.
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Does anyone know if AirPlay was going to play without a Internet connection? I read somewhere (maybe here) they were trying to do that?
It does - it doesn't route traffic outside your LAN.
However, it still can't be as efficient and high-performance as cabled connections when it comes to hi-res video display. Actually, it sucks at gaming and non-native video playback.
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It's called technological progress. If you don't want the state of the art to move forward, that's up to you, but technology is going to change and Apple is on the forefront of that. The 30-pin connector was getting very clunky and inelegant and I think this new adapter will allow smaller, wearable computing devices into the future.
Actually, now that we all know no old multimedia adapters / cables / docking stations will work without additional adapters (if at all - the RGB and composite out seem to be completely dropped), it would have been a much nicer step from Apple to do the following:
use separate micro USB and micro HDMI
as do almost all other companies - Nokia (see e.g. Nokia 808), Samsung etc.
Of course I know they would never do that. After all, profit (selling their clunky, external HDMI etc. converters, $30/$40 adapters, overpriced chargers) is first. Using industry-standard technologies and sockets to make consumers' lives much easier (no need for clunky, awkward HDMI adapters etc)? Nope.
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well considering the new screen ratio, they are soon going to push the iphone and ipod touch to appleTV as a console gaming system.
"Console gaming quality" via the laggy and, for high-fps games, absolutely cr@ppy AirPlay? Is that a joke?