There’s always an upside and a downside to becoming obsessive about an Apple announcement. The upside is getting that adrenaline rush when drool-worthy products like the new MacBook Pro are released. The downside is that when things you’ve been hoping for for, say, three-and-a-half-years, are not delivered. Yes, I know you fell my pain too when I say that the latest line of Apple laptops do not feature Blu-ray disc players.
Yeah, you heard me right, no Blu-Ray, period. Even with the title of format-wars victor, and proliferation in a large variety of laptops, desktops, and DVD players, Apple has yet to offer an option for Blu-Ray disc reading and movie playback. Why was this new technology left out of Apple’s latest load of portables? Well, according the Great Jobs himself, “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt.” What? A bag of hurt?!? That sounds like a threat that a 50’s mobster might make, not an explanation for the lack of Blu-ray support. While Phil Schiller did manage to come to the rescue, claiming that “We have the best HD movie and TV options in iTunes,” I still feel that Apple’s cheating me out of what’s really the highest-quality way to watch movies. Well, there’s always next year.
While I think that eventually Apple will offer Blu-Ray for storage purposes (once the writing drives come down in price more) I don't think we'll ever see it for playing video. Just look at the onerous restrictions within Windows for implementing HDCP over HDMI. Jobs sees the future for movies as being downloaded, not purchased as disks. Given that viewpoint, going through the expense to implement the quasi-impossible restrictions placed by the studios on HiDef/HDCP and you'd come to the same conclusion.
“Apple's cheating me out of what's really the highest-quality way to watch movies.”
Unable to view the new HD format on a small, 6 bit laptop monitor? Mr Freedman, how can you bear to live with such pain and humiliation?
Who cares? I don't watch movies on my laptop. And if adding blue ray adds to the price of the laptop, I agree with leaving it out.
At least finish the quote. He wasn't bashing the format itself.
"It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace."
I'm not going to beat around the bush:
I'm an Alpha Geek (with an EE degree no less) and I would normally jump on anything that looked cool and actually had the potential to delivery something valuable.
When it comes to HD-DVD or Blueray (now just the latter), I explicitly have chosen not to buy into technology at all. Anyone who asks I tell them the truth: buy an up-samping, interpolating DVD player and a moderately better monitor and you'll get 99% of what Blueray buys you for a fraction of the price and without the hassles.
Bluray is to DVD what the DVD-Audio/SACD are to audio CDs: wasted plastic with no benefit for the price.
For mass storage by users I'd put money on magnetic disk drives, post-Flash-NVM and last on optical disk as most likely technologies in play in 5 years.
For distribution to users I'd put money on internet, magnetic disk drives, post-Flash-NVM and optical disk last.
Little things called GMR, CMR and HMR.
Very good Apple, what a choice ! Downloading movies ? No, i'm just working with HD camcorders ! And i'm tired to convert full hd and to lose quality.
What's next ? Mac Pro and iMac with VHS ?
It's a shame ! Apple and me, it's over.
Who needs blu-ray when there's bittorrent or itunes
I have to, respectfully, diagree with much of what 'Jess" said.
All my comments are from direct experience in my own home system:
DVD-Audio and SACD provided a very significant improvement in sound quality over red-book CD's. Not even close.
Also, from a cost/value point of view, you will get a huge jump up in video quality by buying a cheap (they are available at under $200 now) Blu-ray player, rather than spending money on a new monitor and an upsampling dvd player. It's true that the realluy good upsamplers can do an amazing job, but don't let the Best-Buy guys fool you into thinking that all samplers provide decent quality. You have to get one with a pretty good chipset to even come close to what blu-ray offers.