The developers over at Panic were playing with the Apple AV adapter for iPhone 5 (and iPad mini) and realized something was “not right”. They started investigating and discovered that the device wasn’t outputting full HD video (1080p). The signal was of lower quality and had artifacts in it. So they set out to find out why.

It turns out the adapter isn’t outputting the highest quality HD signal you would expect so they cracked the connector open and discovered that it contains a SoC (System on a chip) with dedicated RAM. The team isn’t sure what’s going on but they believe the device is actually performing an AirPlay like function which would explain the degraded quality.

If this is truly what is happening then the question is why? It could be that the new smaller lightning connector doesn’t have enough pins to output full HD so they are using an Airplay like protocol.

It will be interesting to see what others now do with this information. Will Apple even respond?