One thing struck me, other than the inexplicable absence of a “retina” display in the new iPad model, about Apple’s announcement today. Why did Apple not build HDMI into the iPad 2?
It’s not for the lack of space. The iPad 2 is 8.8mm thick (reference), and a female HDMI A port (that it would require) is only 4.55mm high (reference), still giving Apple just over 4mm to play around with and move the port up and down.
However, something else comes into play: money.
The HDMI standard is marshalled by HDMI Licensing LLC. on behalf of the patent owners from companies such as Sony and Toshiba. This works in much the same way as MPEG LA does for the H.264 video codec – everyone pays money to the licensing company, who then dishes it out between the various rights holders.
HDMI requires two licenses in order to be included in devices. The first is an annual fee and you have a choice: either $10,000 straight up (irrespective of number of devices sold), or $5,000 + $1 per device sold. Apple will undoubtedly have the first of these.
In addition to this, you must pay a royalty fee per device that you sell. This fee is a flat rate of 15 cents per device sold; it can be reduced to 5 cents per device if you include HDMI branding in your marketing and product packaging, and a further reduction to 4 cents if you implement the HDMI anti-piracy standard too (Reference for all HDMI costs).
I can’t see Apple doing either of these things (let’s face it, their adapter is called the “Apple Digital AV Adapter” – no mention of HDMI until 2 paragraphs into the description), so let’s assume they’re paying the full 15 cents whack.
The reason Apple haven’t built HDMI into the iPad, and caused everyone a load of hassle with yet another adapter they can lose and that looks stupid, is simple: money.
If you sell 15 million units in 9 months, that equates to over $2,250,000 dollars – yes two and a quarter million – in royalty payments over a single connector. Alternatively, you could sell it as an add-on. Let’s assume 10% of iPad owners will also own the connector – that reduces the royalty payment to a paltry $225,000, which can easily be absorbed in the gigantic markup they make by charging $39 for 2 inches of cable.
So there you have it – so far as I can tell, there is no other real explaination.
Some footnotes that may be of interest:
- the HDMI adapter is going to work with the first iPad, iPhone 4 and 4th gen iPod Touch. However, on anything other than the iPad 2, output is capped at 720p, likely due to a lack of horsepower in graphics which iPad 2 gains. (Reference)
- Movie output is capped at 720p even on the iPad 2 (it’s not that fast then).
- The iPad 2 has the same RAM as the iPad – 256MB. (Reference). UPDATE – it appears this is not the case; thanks @isaach for the heads-up
That’s an interesting point, and I’m sure they enjoy the side effect of not having to pay these additional fees, but when’s the last time you saw Apple add a port to anything?
Surely the cost isn’t a factor…
15c on an item worth on average (if you factor in the different models) over $500? If you assumed a margin of 40% for each iPad, paying the 15c licencing cost would reduce the profit on each iPad by just 0.075%.
In any case, the extra cost would surely be overcome by the additional iPads they would sell if they had included it!
Your explanation has the additional advantage of agreeing with many other decisions that were apparent today. The iPhone4 has a very nice autofocus 5MPixel camera that iSuppli estimates at $15, IIRC. No, we’ll take the 720 fixed-focus flavor, thank you. Ditto RAM: we don’t know how much Apple may have stepped up from the 256MB in iPad1, but it’s a near-certainty they didn’t do the 1024MB that the Xoom sports. Again, it sounds good but users would be hard-pressed to see how it matters. Add up all the stuff that Apple left out in the name of keeping costs low and multiply by … what? 50 million? We could easily be looking at a billion dollars of parts that consumers didn’t have to spend in order to do their FaceTime, surfing, facebooking and GarageBanding.
Oh, PS: the actual hardware for the HDMI costs a few cents, too.
Each time Apple does not clearly talk about something or eludes détails, each time tuer is a catch. Remember the rear iTouch 4 cam. Steve did not say “hey ! There’s a magical 5mp cam. Hé just said casually. “Well… Tuer are 2 cams. ”
Same thing there with the RAM. It’s cheap and not bright from Apple.
I see why no retina display : this way it emphasize the graphic circuit demo.
As the very same iPad 1 game will be eaily faster on iPad 2. With a res upgrade You kill the perf by expanding the rendered surface. Plus as far as devs are concerned
The main reason is that iPad is a wireless device. It’s real video out is AirPlay. 99% of users will never use HDMI. 99% of users do not know what HDMI is. If you ship 50 million iPad 2′s and only 500,000 people use the HDMI port, that is not just 49,500,000 wasted HDMI license fees, it’s 49,500,000 wasted HDMI ports, and 49,500,000 wasted holes cut in the hardware, and Apple Retail employees explaining what that port is. The waste goes way beyond license fees.
This is the same as the USB port and SD card slot, which are also accessories you can purchase for a few bucks extra. Only a very small number of iPad users bought those. Building them in would have been a terrible waste.
The 30-pin connector is a great solution because it’s fundamentally an AC port, but it can also be any one of dozens of other ports for each different user, as well as provide an iPod workflow that millions of regular consumers are familiar with and which provides automatic backup and restore and many consumer electronics accessories.
I’m not convinced by this argument.
Adding extra buttons, sd card reader, or usb/HDMI output is not the way Apple roll, and I think it’s a design decision before anything else.
An iPad loaded with all kinds of slots for different i/o-port would be ugly and uncomfortable. Thus making the user experience less pleasurable.
Agree with Jens, its a design decision. And the decision is backed by additional profits as well!!
I coudldn’t agree more with Hamranhansenhansen.
They don’t have HDMI, because they can leave it out and still sell almost as much as they would if they had HDMI out. Same reason for not having an SD card reader as well. Every major tablet from any other manufacturer will have both HDMI and card reader because they must in order to compete with each other. Ipad doesn’t a true direct competitor, so they can skimp on things like this and more than make it up in accessories sales.