Chances of Apple adopting blu-ray?

So the one thing I'm really missing in all those nice macbooks is blu-ray. Is there any particular reason for this? With Apple bragging about the awesome screen, I really don't understand why it's not there.
And what are the chances we'll see blu-ray support added to that super-drive?

 

As far as pricing apple knows they cannot knock up the price for a blu-eay player too much as they do with their other stuff, so it isn't a worthwhile investment for them yet

 

LOL.. we're not talking about macbook air here.
Slot loading optical drive have size standards like hdds. If a DVD burner can fit inside a macbook, a Blueray optical drive can fit in there as well. The only major difference between a DVD burner and Blueray burner is just 1 extra laser emitter (a.k.a blueray) the size of 1/10 of pinky nail.

 

The size argument seems to be a pretty poor one to me. Sony seems to fit them into most of their laptops, whether it be the AW, FW, Z or TT. Size is just a lame excuse.

Apple commonly lacks in the adoption of some technologies. Although its true that they pushed the adoption of a touch interface in media players, they can remain behind in other areas for quite some time particularity in the area of optical drives. I remember them selling CD writers with a dvd reader long after most other desktop and notebook manufacturers had moved on to selling dvd/cd writers/readers. Also look at how long it took them to get an SD card reader into their laptops.

I see no reason why blu ray drives are not offered for the apple notebook line up and especially not for the desktop systems like the mac pro. Blu ray has emerged as the accepted HD optical format for video. Apple computers that are supposed to be amazing at video editing don't at least have them as an option on the apple website.

 

To tell you the truth, Apple introducing the SD card slot really took me by surprise.

A lot of photo professionals have asked for this for quite some time now. Years. And Apple just didn't want to do it. They did it now.

I'm thinking the same will go down for Blu-Ray. Not a lot of people need/want it as of today, and thus Apple might wait another couple of years before actually implementing it.

The surprise would be Snow Leopard actually supporting it, so maybe the next batch of computers would sport the drive.

The more realistic view point is maybe with the introduction of the next Mac OS X. After Snow Leopard... Maybe...

 

Lol right I was out of line, and made a stupid assumption... but as far as pricing I still think I am partially correct... I used to be a big apple fan but as of recent... it just seems to me pointless to buy a Laptop from apple... they price their computers as if they have a monopoly on the market, which they partially do since if you buy a mac there are alot less options as far as upgrading and user changes... you often have to go through apple for everything, rely on them... Reminds me a bit of the Romans lol and we all know what happened to them

 

Blu ray drives are still really expensive, but I imagine by this time next year they become pretty standard on so called multimedia notebooks. Note: I am waiting for the flame wars to begin...again.

 

Nero also like flames.... lol JK I don't want to start a flame war

 

External Blueray Optical Drive was on sale for like$65 or $70 from newegg last week. LOL

A lot of the Mac users are not tight on cash and can afford a blueray drive even if its like $250 upgrade.

 

Why is that? That's a pretty weak argument.
@OP: Why not just get an external blu-ray drive if you want one so bad? Problem solved.
Personally, I'm not a blu-ray fan, so I could live without it. Bluray is so much more expensive, for not only the drives, but the discs. Just not worth it IMHO. Standard DVD FTW!!

 

What about the price of an internal blu-ray reader/writer? You are still looking at several hundreds dollars for something not all people necessarily want (although with Apple its usually a case of them telling and hence giving to you what you apparently want). Still, despite the expensive blu-ray should at least be an option by now.

 

Internal drives should be cheaper than external ones assuming they're the same drive. It's like external hdd is more expensive than internal hdd. Also, OEM gets the hardware at lower prices because they buy them in volumes.

 

I dont think the software support is there yet. Even with an external drive OSX 10.5 cannot read blu-ray it seems. Maybe Snow Lepoard will change that.

 

Blu-Ray is obviously a bag of hurt.

 

When Blu-Ray burners become more affordable I would not mind having one. Affordable as in lower than HDDs in price per GB. Maybe in 1-2 years lol.

 

Yeah just like SSD.

 

I don't see apple doing Blu-ray at all... DVD/disc media etc are a dying format, they have maybe 10 years max left before they are over-run by digital downloads. Apple knows this and thus with apple TV and iTunes has placed itself in the later camp.
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Perhaps Apple does not want people to buy Blue-Ray. Instead, they want people do buy video and movies from the iTunes store. The success of Blue-Ray would be at odds with the profits of the iTunes store.

The reason why we see Blue-Ray drives on Sony laptops is because Sony has a vested interest in the success of Blue-Ray. Sony invested millions and millions into that technology, movie studios, and films.

 

yeah, but I really like to have an all-in-one complete system. And an external drive just wouldn't look right next to the macbook's smooth design.
Perhaps I'll wait for just one more macbook product line upgrade to see if they'll add it

 

At least publicly in Earnings Report conference calls, Jobs and co. have stated as recently as 1/09 that Apple is not pursuing BluRay due to licensing restrictions, not the production cost of including the technology.

The other reason is that there is little point to viewing the high res quality of BR on any screen of lower resolution, and since Apple also doesn't include HDMI-out in any of their portable models..... that effectively negates the remaining reason to put it in as supporting external monitor/tv viewing of BR source material.

 

well,there are some reasons-

1)they want you to get movies from iTunes
2)licensing
3)demand(lack of it)

if we keep asking, they may offer it in,um, 5 years...

 

As soon as blu-ray prices go down, I think. It's a smart move for Apple to have adapted Nvidia cards before stepping up to the blu-ray trend.

 

I would rather like to get another 100$ off then B-R

 

I was just about to type that same thing, good thing I check the last page

But yeah, that's why we won't see it.

 

It maybe true that Apple was faster with video editing 10 years ago but that was 10 years ago, infact windows is 20x faster at video encoding/decoding.

The only reason why Apple is taking 5 years to catch up with mainstream hardware is purely greed and profit driven. The older the parts are the better the profits and that is their philosophy.

The other main reason why they refuse to add blueray is sony has hurt them real bad with blueray. Apple only store are not doing so well because main stream people prefer HD blueray videos than huge files with low quality video from Apple online store.

I will not buy Sony Laptop until they implement back lit keyboard, until then i am going for looks, sticking with Macbook pro and iMac.

 

Windows is not 20x faster at video encoding/decoding, at least with the same hardware.

 

Yeah it was a bag of hurt especially on the financial side of it. BD killed Apple online movies real bad. Who would wanna download movies online? I dont. I'd rather burn movies from my BD to my HD.

 

Agree with above, seems blue ray is just an example of how macs are behind today. What the mac should have: 15.4 1920x1200, blue-ray, GT 130m, express card, HDMI, eSATA. There is no real reason for it to not have these except apple being cheap. However if apple would implement blueray they would need to upgrade the screens to full HD, the 15.4inch is still 1440x900, the 13inch is 1280x800, not sure why.

What really is annoying is apple these days is playing the consumer. 2gig upgrade in ram and a faster processor for the same price, it must be better! Wrong, I felt like the $2000 model is downgraded, the 2.66Ghz is a new budget cpu, and 4gigs of ram is $20. However you loose the expresscard, 256mb of vram, and most importantly the removable battery. A lot of people rave about the 7 hours battery. Fist of all its only 5 when tested at a reasonable screen brightness, and it doesn't matter because if anyone needs a lot of mobile time they just buy another battery. And if it indeed last 5 years as they claim, its still more expensive than a normal battery do the math. Normal: $50 every two years = $25 a year, Mac replacement cost ($170 + $50) $220 ever five years = $44 a year, not to mention for about $70-$100 you can buy a 12-cell extended batter for most pcs to get 8 hours plus.

However apple plays up people who think that .16Ghz increase is soo fast. One of my friends who is thinking about buying apple wants to buy the 2.66 new macbook instead of the 2.4 15.4inch because he thought the 2.4 was too slow for downloading music. So hes probably going to buy a $2000 macbook pro instead of a modern Pc like an HP HDX series with a faster GPU, Blue-ray, same processor, HDMI, express card, better battery life, and better screen for $500 less. The only advantage would be slightly better looks(debatable since there are a lot of nice pcs today) and user friendly "idiot proof" OS. I like my macbook because at the time it was the best portable computer out there, but now the current 13inch macbook "pros" are basically the same.

 

It would be nice if apple would add some features that people want, that is common in the "PC" world... like Blu-Ray .. but honestly I don't really care, I don't see the use of it for myself, so... while people are more like me, and not loud and outraged about it, its not going to change.

 

I would be down with Bluray if it wasn't for its expense.

Because it is an expensive item, I don't really mind that macs dont support it at this time.

As for downloading HD content, its more like HD in sheeps skin. It cannot and will not compare to real Bluray. Hopefully bluray becomes affordable soon. Too bad HD-DVD died an early death.

 

BD too expensive? For HP its $150 option, they even had a sale for 4 months where it was a free upgrade, that on a $900 platform, I think the macbook pro has enough money in it's 25% profit margin to cover that.

 

I'm pretty sure he/she meant the cost of the media itself (ex: BR DVDs)

 

$150 is too expensive, $100 is too expensive, BR RW are expensive, BR movies are expensive, renting blurays are expensive.

Bluray is expensive all around.

 

Yeah I guess $30 a BD is a little expensive, but it can only go down. I figure next year it will be the same as DVDs, and then it would suck not to have a BD reader. Most pcs you can upgrade you optical drive after you buy it, usually by unscrewing one screw and pulling it out. I'm not sure but I don't think you can do that on a unibody mac. If you can apple should make replacement BD drives to upgrade next year.

 

I'm not sure what the cost of bluray would be next year, but it will be less obviously. If its a lot closer to DVD costs, I hope apple would adopt it then. I'm not so sure if you would be able to upgrade the current macbooks so easily to bluray if Apple does decided to go that route in the future.

DVD's were expensive in the past, but what many people forget is that DVD's offered way way more than what Bluray has brought to the table.

Bluray or Hi Def general has so many hurdles to overcome for it to be cheap, and the biggest hurdle IMO is consumers not being able to see the difference.

 

So are DDR3(less so) and SSDs, but that doesn't stop Apple from offering them.

Since when do Apple fans care about price? Especially "Pros".

PS: I never pay retail ($30) for Blu-Ray movies. They run $16-$25, while the DVD is $10-$12 for the same title.

 

I watched Full HD movies on my macbook every day w/o any problems... and if apple starts to please anybody I won't by one since it wont be proper apple anymore ;D

 

"Full HD movies"

How did u get Full HD movies on your macbook ?

Download them of the net?

 

That would just raise prices of Apple notebooks again, if blu-ray is to be introduced. Along with the Apple tax. SSDs are a more viable piece of hardware to adopt.

 

Yeah sure, SSDs will be a tenth of the price and x10 in capacity in couple of years, that's good investment right now...

I have BR on my PS3 , and I clearly can see the difference between a BR and a DVD, moreover on a big screen.

 

mostly from friends...

 

They rip it off? or download it ?

 

My fiends dad gets them @ work,where they have "corporate media-server" with lots of multimedia,so he has loots of cool staff

 

Also known as having a Time Base Corrector (TBC) somewhere in that facility.


I cant help but to ask does anyone use BD for DATA? After all the other half of the BD debate was the storage capacity not the movie aspect.

A BD media (disc) is a lot cheaper than having to buy storage drives every other week to download DATA. I use mine to burn tons of DATA and its the best investment I ever made.

We have to remember Apple was one of the co signers of support for BD and as of such does not officially make anything for it. Roxio and their Toaster 10 is supported by Apple and is being supplied with most 3rd party BD burners.

 

I burn alot of data from servers to BD and keep them offsite. by far one of the best investments for myself and the companies I deal with

 

The last we heard from Steve Jobs about it was that the licensing was too expensive/restrictive.
Perhaps Jobs doesn't accept blu-ray is the format of choice and is waiting for the next generation of discs. Consumers would back him up here, since the end of the high def wars, the blu-ray uptake hasn't been good AT ALL.

 

Right now, the cost of blank BRD is too high to be a reasonable replacement for dual-layer DVD.

If you want BRD just for video, you need to install Windows on your Mac and get a BRD-ROM. There's no absolute need to wait for Apple's adoption of the technology.

 

UM... single layer blank blueray disks cost less than dual-layer dvd per GB.

 

What is your point? In order to get the extra 5% extra per GB savings, people have to buy large BRD packs. Single discs are much more expensive. Throw in the price of a BRD burner versus a DVD-burner, and the latter is much more affordable for a vast majority of users. What you fail to understand is that MOST users don't want to spend hundreds on a good BRD burner and then get lots of blanks just to achieve a decent price per disc discount.

Dual layer DVD is still much cheaper per disc AND per Gb unless the buyer is willing to buy large quantities of BRD blanks that they probably don't need.

 

Yeah BD isn't as cheap as dvds, but Macs arn't cheap either. Where is the money going? Currently not in the budget cpu, or the outdated gpu, or the non-HD screen, or the non-removable battery. Its true that apple refuses to sell a mac at less than 20% profit. It might be because of customer support cost/they do have one of the best, but there is more than enough room to cover a blue ray player. And if your buying a mac, you have the $5 extra dollars to buy a BD movie over a DVD. Not having one is just cheaping out on a feature that is only going to become more and more popular, despite how it might be more expensive today. I have a 1920x1200 res screen on my laptop, a DVD takes up literally a tenth of the screen, maximized its a blur. Blue ray movies are completely clear. If I didn't have a BD drive, the entertainment value of my pc would be severely compromised.