Piper Jaffray says new MacBooks could be priced from $899 - Page 4

I'm not trying to. That's why I said let's get back on topic. Let's = let + us, so I'm admitting that I was getting sidetracked as well.


Apple's interests are aligned with consumers the most, not niche audiences like those who want to download HD content to watch on their tiny 13"-17" laptop displays. You're ignoring my angle, which is about the average laptop user. This whole thread is on a story about...LAPTOPS.

I know I'm trying to stay on topic (and not doing a very good job of it), but that's an excellent point.

The MBP is a PRO machine not designed for the average Joe on the street.

Pros ought to have the option to burn to BD fro the reasons stated earlier. It's not about watching movies on a laptop.

What is needed for the average consumer isn't germane to the MBP feature set. The MACBOOK is the machine for the average consumer in Apple's laptop lineup.

Hmm, I think I misunderstood your use of the term "HD content." I thought you were trying to back up iNtel iNside's argument for BD read support, which clearly isn't the case. So...what are we arguing about? I don't believe I ever stated opposition to BD writing, though I did protest any type of internal BD drive (read, write, or both) in their laptops as it's pretty clear with the Air they're moving towards external disc drives for those who actually need them.

I think people make too much hay over this capping issue. Its largely being tested at this point. Its not really that well organized an effort. The FCC is frowning at the practice of ISP blocking or throttling. Their are still efforts to offer free municipal wifi as well as nation wide broadband access. Their is a bill bumping around congress that will force ISP to achieve 1Mbs by 2015.

With that competition will continue between wired ISPs as well as improvements in wireless data speed and access.

Pros do have the option with external drives. Which would burn faster than any internal notebook drive.

Along with bandwidth, compression will continue to improve. Compression is far better today than it was just a couple of years ago.

Where we are today is only where we are today. Things will be different tomorrow.


Those who are 25 and under today are a growing market for downloading media. When they are 30 and over they will not have any attachment to physical media the way 30 and over have today.

Yes but we live in the present.

Blue Ray is a bridge to downloaded HD content. Its the way most people are going to get their HD content for the next 5-10 years.

The issues of bandwidth caps and the need for fiber to the home (in order to download HD content easily) are currently unresolved. I don't want to suggest that they will never be resolved but it will take time. Especially fiber to the home. That will be expensive for the cable/telco operators and will take time.

Hence the need for BD fro the next 5-10 years so consumers can get HD content NOW.

Dude read the posts before commenting then.

Its about giving pros the tools to create and distribute HD content. You know things like Final Cut Studio, Mac Pros and MacBook PROS.

People can get Blu-ray by buying a $150 Blu-ray appliance for their home. I don't see a rational need or overwhelming desire to play BR video on their notebooks. Especially when on a notebook they will be lucky to get finished with a 2 hour movie before the machine dies from draining the battery. Hasn't HD-DVD and Blu-ray been hacked so we can now copy the files to our HDDs so they play at the much much lower power consumption than optical drive would allow?

I know YOU know the difference between average consumers and pros.

Pros want to create, edit and distribute HD content.

They need tools to do this.

Some don't want add ons to carry around.

BD is THE means for distributing HD content now.

The ability to burn BDs is also useful to pro photographers due to he larger capacities.

The MBP used to be designed fro the 80th percentile not the 50th percentile. That's why it has things like dedicated graphics and FW 400 and 800 ports. Sure apple upsell them to people who would be just as well served by MacBooks. Does that mean Apple should abandon the pro market?

We've been over this now several times. Why don't we want to give pros the tools they need?

I'm all about giving the Pros what they need, but it's a balancing act. We need to consider how many pros are actually using BRD, wanting to use BRDs, and how these BRDs fit into Apple's vision of the vision. While I'm not surprised that the MBPs don't BRDsor expect them to in the future based on the evidence of the cost of 12.7mm drives and the lack of 9.5mm drivesI am very surprised their Pro apps been offered authoring offerings for the Mac Pro for a built-in option and a 3rd-party external option.

I understand that there are professions that could benefit from Blu-ray as an option, but my argument that thickening the case of having Apple "magically" create a 9.5mm BRD doesn't make any sense in the world as we know it.

PS: There was an announcement (that I'v made several times now) that Panasonic announced a 9.5mm slotloadign drive back in 12/2007 to be announced at CES in 2008, but no more evidence has come to light about the drive. While this is an odd thing for Apple to hush, it isn't unlike Apple to put the kibosh on a technology that they will to further introduce in a later product. So who knows. But if this is the case, we will certainly here complaints about how it's so much more than than than the faster and cheaper BRD found in much cheaper tray-loading BRDs that are an inch thick. I guess you can't please everyone.

Two points.

1) BD is THE format for distributing HD content. Yes digital distribution will eventually overtake BD but that's in the future. Apple's vision may need to focus on the now as well as the future.

2) The 9.5mm thickness budget for a BD drive is an artificial constraint. If the MBP were made 3mm thicker would it really detract from the form factor that much?

You may think that, but saying it doesn't make it true.

In my world (independent computer technician in the DC area) the MBP is for people with a lot of money who want a larger screen and a silver case, instead of white or black.

Just because it costs a ton and it's called a pro model doesn't mean that that's who buys it. Apple knows that, and that's why they equip it the way they do. If Apple decides that making the MBP pro thicker for all the rich teens who buy it and the few pros who need a BD is worth it, then you can count on seeing it as an option. If not, no amount of arguing will make it happen.

Yeah rich teenagres use that FW 800 port all the time.

Like I said, Apple upsell MBPs to average consumers, but it was designed for pros.

Pretty much all of the HD content I watch is recorded on my cable DVR and from my cable video on demand.

BR is THE format for delivering High-Profile 1080p video with 7.1 channel digital audio. But that doesn't seem to be as important to as many people as the Blu-ray consortium would have us believe when upcoverting DVD players are "good enough" for right now and considerably cheaper. Not to mention that most people still don't have the Video output or the audio capabilities of taking advantage of what Blu-ray has to offer.

On top of that, I still don't see why people think customers are clamoring to have a blu-ray drive reader or otherwise in their notebooks for an excessively high price just to plyace a video that won't look any better than an upconverting DVD player on their on their 15" LCD (average size). Perhaps upcoverting DVD players in notebooks would be the most economical and logical step until Blu-ray finally does overtake DVD... if it ever does.


It is an artificial constraint. Apple could use a desktop-grade Blu-ray optical drive in a 6" thick notebook if it wanted to. It would certainly be much faster for reading and writing or all optical media—'m obviously going to an extreme for the sake of the argument—but Apple has been all about making a premium product that usually included the slimmest design possible, even at the expense of removing functionality (read: the early MBP lack of DL-DVD burning when the previous PBs had it).

PS: Would an external Blu-ray burner that is 15mm+ high, thus offering considerable read and write times over a slim internal BRD be a bad thing for the very select individuals that will need/want this option?

Working for a company that authors dvds - SD and BR - I don't see the point of apple including a BR burner if they are not going to support it in pro-Apps.

Currently, the "pro's can use an external BR burner" argument doesn't work because there is no way to author professionally and to BD spec in OSX. We already have had to turn to windows/PC-based solutions for authoring BR as Bootcamp has been problematic as well.


I believe that yes, the extra 3mm would detract from the form factor. I daresay that a 3mm increase in the dimensions of an internal component would increase the thickness of the case by more than 3mm, and not just due to the size of the one component but to the change in arrangement of other components around it.

I agree with the solipsism that "pro's" truly needing BR burning in an mpb are such a small segment of the market that it wouldn't be worth compromising the form factor of the mbp to please. I would be happy to use an external B-R burner and keep the aesthetics of the mbp design intact, as long as apple had some bloody software support for it in DVDSP.

If you had read my comment, it was your comments that confused me.

Oh, and I know what a pro is, thanks. Apple does too, obviously, but they also include the MacBook Pro in their Back to School sale every single year. Hmmm...interesting.

I'm typing this on a 15" PowerBook G4 that was considered a pro machine three years ago, yet I don't even really consider myself a "power user."

Why? Because 15"-screened laptops have more mainstream appeal than smaller 13"-screened laptops, regardless of who anyone thinks they're "made" or "meant" for.


In reality, neither BD nor digital distribution have seriously "taken off" when it comes to HD distribution in any major capacity.

A 3mm thickness increase would not be good for Apple, but in backtomac's defense, the thickness wouldn't have to be a full 3mm since the 17" MBP is also 1" thick and uses the 12.7mm optical drive. Apple would have to rearrange their entire internal setup to accommodate for a thicker drive and have had 3 years to figure out a way to make this happen, but I still have major reservations that they would go to all that trouble just for an overly expensive, BRD optical option that doesn't even seem to be popular as a CD/DVD option.

Here are pics and specs of the 15" and 17" optical drives, respectively, in the current MBPs... (Red shows where the 9.5mm is lacking is performance over the slightly larger 12.7mm drives in green)

— 24x CD-R

— 10x CD-RW
— 8x DVD-R
— DVD+R
— DVD+RW
— DVD-RW
— 4x DVD-R DL (double layer)
— DVD+R DL (double layer)



— 24x CD-R
— 16x CD-RW
— 8x DVD-R
— DVD+R
— DVD+RW
— 6x DVD-RW
— 4x DVD-R DL (double layer)
— DVD+R DL (double layer



PS: I appreciate the agreement, Sennen, I'm finding myself on the extreme minority of this argument despite months of showing that slim, slot-loading BRD just aren't feasible at this time.

Part of the argument is about using BD as a storage medium for any data. Which can be done on OS X with Toast Titanium. I'm not entirely sure how well its ability to author BD movies. OS X doesn't support BD DRM in any way. Authoring with AACS is out of the question.

The professional DVD authoring shops I've seen are generally Windows based. And they are also generally using proprietary authoring tools. Is that your set up?

I am under the impression that Montevina will be offering HDCP built right into the chipset which would make Apple introducing new Blu-ray capable Pro Apps and iLife a much more likely solution. But if they go with NVIDIA will that option still be available?

Whilst it would be ideal to have an all-in-one solution, which is what I might still prefer, one has to look at the reality of the situation. ie aesthetics and cost don't allow for a slot-loading blu ray drive at this point in time.

Even as a "pro" user I would be a small segment of the market these days, and I wouldn't mind carrying an external blu-ray burner around to be honest. I think if apple at least had authoring support for BD, then most "pro's" would be happy that they could go from camera to final product with FCS on a mac - and those doing so on an mbp still have the external option in order to output to disc.

For data storage and even burning BD images as test discs, Toast is fine. As an authoring tool, it is nowhere near up to spec, for SD let alone BD. No company would use it to send a product out for replication, you are just asking for trouble.


We have an office with 12 macs and 3 pc's, and still do SD authoring in DVDSP. re: the windows-based proprietary tools, it seems like the old avid/FCP argument to me. For a small business (albeit with a large volume of titles), I don't see that the incredible expense of something like sonic can be justified.

We wanted to stay with apple for blu-ray and as a beta-tester in the past have pushed them for 2 years or more for BD support in DVDSP... It's a massive undertaking, assuredly, but disappointing that they don't seem interested even in getting a non-BD-J version out.

Researching Newegg, The best I was able to find is a full size Blu-ray burner for about $250. These are DR-R writable drives, which would probably be 6x the speed of an 9.5mm slot-loading BRD drive that a MBP would offer. That price, expect for the that $370 model, doesn't include an external case to hold the internal drive. It also doesn't offer any Mac OS X software, which I assume is one reason why the $999 12.7mm "FastMac" option cost more than the cheaper "Windows" options that are available on Google Shopping for at a lower pricepoint.

PS: I still can't help but wonder why Apple has released BR capable Pro apps and and at least official support (at least by 3rd-parties) for the Mac Pro and external drive options for their Pro notebooks if it was serious about supporting Blu-ray. It makes no business absolutely no business sense to thicken the size and wright of their notebooks, add a nearly a a grand to their notebook cost, and add untested SW at a point that benefits so few customers, and turns off the great majority of them.