Gui Rambo, last night:
Can this dongle run Doom? Of course it can!
The dongle is Apple’s Lightning Digital AV Adapter, and he got there by emulating its firmware, a stripped-down version of XNU.
He’s been on a run. The Apple TV 4K came first: “New Apple TV 4K is too expensive, so I decided to virtualize one on my Mac instead of buying it.” Then a HomePod mini, Sound Glow and all, which raised a better question: can Xcode just build and run an app into one? It can. Then iPhones and iPads, and then the Studio Display XDR, which is a monitor, “why not”.
Then Apple shipped the HomeView software and he had a virtual one up the same night, face editing UI and all, two weeks before the hardware starts shipping on the 13th. It runs tvOS. It also runs a new launcher: not SpringBoard, not PineBoard, not SoundBoard, but BreadBoard, with Control Center in its own process called CupBoard. Steve Troughton-Smith took the full tour through Gui’s VM.
But the dongle! That one takes me straight back to 2013.
Panic, March 2013, doing video-out testing for a project: their Lightning adapter capped out at 1600×900 instead of 1080p, lagged, and put MPEG artifacts around text. The old Dock Connector adapter did none of that. So they worked out that the adapter had to be decoding a compressed stream, decided there was no way a plug that small could do that, and got out the hacksaw.
Your eyes don’t deceive you — that tiny chip says ARM. And the H9TKNNN2GD part number on there points towards RAM — 2Gb worth.
In short: it appears the Lightning Digital AV Adapter has a SoC CPU.
Fifty dollars of HDMI cable with an ARM chip and 256MB of RAM in it. Cabel turns it into a selling point:
The good news? If someone complains that this insignificant plug costs $50, tell them it’s a tiny computer!
I love that post. Please, go read it, that website is so good. Fuck, I love Panic’s design chops.