Somebody has to pay the piper-- the hardware to transmit HDMI has to exist somewhere. With a smart adapter, only the people who need the feature have to pay for it.
Seriously ? All the arguments about Apple products "just working" and being "premium products", now change to "only people who need the feature have to pay for it" ?
"Now"? The iMac G3 didn't have a floppy but I'm sure you could buy an external floppy drive. Macs after that rarely had a full VGA or DVI port, people had to buy adapters. Starting with the MacBook Air, we had to buy external optical drives, external ethernet adapters, external FireWire adapters... This is not news. And I'm saying that as someone who hates Lightning with all their heart :)
But given economy of scale, they (per person) will pay more for it than the amount they would have paid if everybody bought that hardware in their phone.
And economy of scale does work. I do not think Apple can seriously undercut Samsung because they managed to leave out a HDMI chip.
I think Apple's reason for this connector is more one of aesthetics: why have X > 1 chips that can communicate with the outside world and, typically, X connectors? Full wireless is not yet an option, so they need one. Then, they need some way to figure out what is on the other end of the line.
Why they didn't pick USB3, I don't know. Not proprietary enough? Connectors too bulky? Low power spec not (yet) available? Not flexible enough? Supports too many devices? (If you put an USB connector in, people will expect that it works with their hard disk, photo camera, keyboard, mouse, etc)
