I remember rolling my eyes a bit when people complained about the new connector, but man, this thing actually is starting to sound kind of evil...
I think lots of future cables will have these chips in them. In thunderbolt, the chip mutiplexes & demultiplexes the data. Perhaps the idea is that speed increases can be had just by upgrading your cable instead of upgrading the port.
In the lightning cable, the chip is also responsible for determining the orientation of your connection, since the connector is reversible.
There is no benign reason to involve authentication to shove 5V over the wire.
Except that now nobody can make a cable/connector without Apple giving them permission first.
Sure sounds like DRM to me.
And now the end-user cannot use any cables he likes. Only those cables blessed by the proprietary connector vendor. You have authentication where none is needed, exclusively to give the vendor power, not to provide the end-user with benefits.
Both are about digital data/signals and having artificial restrictions imposed on them. I think the similarities are good enough to warrant the name DRM.
If there are more adopters of lightpeak, there will be other cable manufacturers, and users can buy any cable they want. People who don't understand electronics also wouldn't understand how this might benefit the user.
Personally, I think lightpeak is a fairly interesting way of implementing something, it enables ports to be a lot more capable without having to replace electronics on the motherboard.
Perhaps users who don't fully understand what is going on inside would prefer to think that it's something evil...