Jonathan Delgado's Weblog

Work bought me an iPad, which is great. My goal in acquiring it was to use it as a substitute for my work-issued MacBook that gets carted in to the office every now and then when I need to run some mobile presentations and such. One of the things that had me sold on this potential was that Apple sells a VGA adapter for the iPad that connects via the dock port.

So today we had a meeting at work and it was my big chance to show off how well this plan was work. I hook the iPad up to our projector with the VGA adapter. Oddly, I don’t get any mirrored display.

Change around inputs on the projector looking for signals. Still nada.

Go into iPad settings to see if any new option has popped up recognizing the attached bit of hardware. Also nada.

Google around a bit and… oh damn. According to Apple (Article HT4108):

The iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter can play content to a VGA display when using the following apps:

• Videos
• Photos—Slideshow playback only
• YouTube
• Keynote
• Safari—Video content on webpages

So until I actually start playing a video, photos, etc. I get no output at all from the VGA. I can’t browse websites in Safari over VGA, so I can’t, for example, use the iPad to go through our help desk ticketing system during the weekly group meeting. Can’t demonstrate application configuration on the big screen, etc etc. I generally like Apple hardware, and I really want to like this and for it to work, but it has just turned into a big failure and disappointment.

I understand that Apple might want to, under some circumstances, restrict your video output so you aren’t arbitrarily dumping licensed content out over a digital connection. Instead with this they are limiting you so tightly over what they will allow you to output, for no real explainable reason. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the VGA output be universal and then restrict certain flagged content (which they already do) if you try to push it out over the adapter?

I can only come up with two possible explanations for why this is done this way:

1. The iPad is running an OS that is still fundamentally thinking it is dealing with something more along the lines of an iPod Touch, and that all that there really is worth displaying on a big screen is videos and photos.
2. If you were able to hook up the iPad to an external display and use a Bluetooth keyboard on it, you would pretty much kill some large percentage (lets just say 20%) of the market for notebooks like the MacBook Air. So cripple the iPad to force consumers to move further up the foodchain to get full video out capability.

Hopefully this is just the first case and things will improve with the next OS release. I really do like my iPad, but this feature has pretty much killed a large part of its intended functionality.