Remember that SmallRig second screen we were all excited about last year? The one that would airplay to the back of an iPhone, now available in a wired config. Useful?
ASKED BY · Jason Robbershaw · SARASOTA, FLORIDA · 23 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:00:41
Prefers wired solutions and doesn't understand why it took so long to release the wired version. Notes it should have lower latency but doesn't specify by how much.
Purchased the wireless version but found that AirPlay ties up phone functions and limits other capabilities; wired version makes more practical sense.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
0:21And oh, a couple of things. If you want to ask a question live, you can use this little QR code here. it'll take you to a site and you can fill in a question. Also, I'm going to tell you some other ways to get in touch with us and chat about nerd stuff. Anyway, Alexander, what's the first question? First question this morning is coming in from Jason Robbershaw in Sarasota, Florida.
0:44Remember that small rig second screen we were all excited about last year? The one that would AirPlay to the back of an iPhone, now available in a wired config. Useful? so i'll tell you jason and uh alexander's gonna chat about this too i did buy one of those little things looks like this let's see if i get the reflection and you know what it's super cute and
1:05it's and it's pretty cool the way it works except the wire as it turns out the wireless is kind of a problem what's your thought on it alexander i agree i mean i i didn't buy one last year because i didn't want to use something that used airplay i you know i prefer to always use cable wired solutions if possible so i'm i don't understand why they didn't release this in the first place
1:26i don't know why it took so long but that said it's finally here so i'm finally going to buy one of these things and it looks like you cannot buy it right now right now i just looked at the the small rig uh website here so this is what we're looking at here it comes bundled with a little short stubby usb-c cable even has this little bluetooth remote i guess for triggering
1:46records which looks interesting it's uh works up to 10 meters but yeah it comes with the cable it shows up for me as 86.90 I guess that's Canadian it converted to Canadian price so I put my name on the list to notify me I definitely want one and I guess in theory it should be lower latency but I don't know how much less latency it's got because it doesn't seem to say
2:11here. So I'll report back. I'll let you know as soon as I have one. Yeah, I don't think the, I hear what you're saying about latency, Alexander, but considering what this, the intended purpose of this thing is, just to help you frame, I don't think the latency issues are that big of an issue. I will say this. I was super excited about this. I thought, oh,
2:32that's a blah, blah, blah, blah. And you get the thing and then you realize that once you AirPlay, I think it's the way it does it, you AirPlay your phone screen to its screen, there's a lot of other things you can't do with your phone anymore. Like, I like to monitor off of, you know, where are they? The AirPods. I call them my Air Jordans.
3:00And you can't do that because a lot of faculties of the phone are tied up just sending a picture out to that display. So I literally have never used it for anything. It was an absolute waste of 60 bucks or whatever it cost last year. And I will say that a wired version of it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. And considering that you can now, you know,