Yes, it was downright ugly on the BR and HD-DVD forums over at AVS, and wherever else it was debated. But to get back on topic, I'd buy a blu-ray equipped Mac in a second, but I'm not holding my breath. And on that note, good night to all.
Steve Jobs is correct and Andy Parsons is an idiot. They rushed an incomplete format (Blu-ray) to market and it shows. There is no similarity between the introduction of DVDs and of Blu-ray. DVD video was a unified format and everyone got behind it. The reason it took a while to grow was that they didn't have much manufacturing capacity for DVDs and the failure rate was high in the beginning. Blu-ray and HD-DVD fought it ought in the marketplace, but it wasn't a real fight. Sony paid off movie studios to drop the HD-DVD format. It's really more of a repeat of the introduction of SACD and DVD-Audio. Both formats fought it out and like a movie cliche, killed each other at the end of the duel. There wasn't much advantage to consumers either: Music that couldn't be burned to an iPod, somewhat better audio quality, and surround sound mixes that were often completely unnatural.
If there will be another physical media for video, it will probably be a storage medium with no moving parts, holographic or flash memory-based. There might be some use for an Apple Blu-ray drive, but I'm not sure what it would be. 50 GB of slow optical storage doesn't get you very far as a backup medium. Good bye Blu-ray and good riddance.
Yes, I'm sure you would have gotten behind a MICROSOFT backed format using a MICROSOFT codec.
You need to get your facts straight. And no, I don't really either stupid format due to its DRM and other crap BOTH formats had.
Wish the mac at least had Blu-Ray. It would be awesome to watch Blu-Ray movies on that giant screen.
Anyway, till then there's always my actual Blu-Ray player (part of my $30 Blu-Ray Sound Bar home theatre system). Or my brother's PS3. I don't know about others, but my family certainly gets more Blu-Ray movies from the movie store than iTunes rentals.
Glad legitimate buyers of bluray movies are subsidising this practice ...
P.S. Sorry for derailing the topic but the post rubbed me the wrong way.
Well you can enjoy waiting a minute for the disc to load, I mean, for the disc to make sure you haven't "modified" your BD player, or update the firmware on your player to pointlessly patch the keys on it or be able to play the latest BS Java protection, or be forced to watch all the promos.
The rest of us will open up a file and be on our way
I can't believe this is still the case. As for licensing, build it into the cost of an add-on BR option and let customers make the decision.
It would be one thing if most Macs didn't already have an optical drive of some sort, and Apple was hesitant to add something entirely new. But instead they added a SD card slot into the latest Mini while still including the standard DVD drive. Just add it as an option and see if customers are willing to pay for the upgrade. There's almost no risk for Apple to do so (especially on the already-expensive Mac Pro, which offers a second optical drive and other esoteric options such as a fibre-channel card!)
Personally, I think the main reason for no Blu Ray is that Stevo thinks it might eat into iTune video sales/rentals a little bit, and every little bit counts, so why offer the high image quality of Blu Ray, if you want people to buy movies from iTunes. The other arguments he offers sound pretty weak to me.
Excuse me but you seem to be the idiot. You apparently know nothing about Apple or else you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement. Apple is famous for NOT raising prices while at the same time improving the features and functions of the newest model (faster processors, more memory, speedier graphics, higher resolution screens) WITHOUT raising the price = providing even greater value! The other key factor about blu-ray is that the movies sold on these disks are ridiculously expensive! A ripoff by the studios. The benefit of watching blu-ray content on a smaller computer screen is minimal and not even worth arguing about. Its a large screen format.
people buy blu ray movies, period, just like they bought dvds. my blu ray dvd collection is growing by the month. i use to buy dvds, now i buy blu ray cause the cost is similar if not less than dvd most of the time.
i like blu ray cause i want to have media that i can watch on my computer, watch on my big screen 1080p tv, and bring to work or wherever the heck i want, without having to pay apple for hardware so that i can do the same thing with digital movies (ie apple tv). i don't want to worry about a huge digital movie collection stored on an unreliable hard drive. i also don't wanna have to worry about backing up that prospective digital movie collection on other hard drives to secure my investment. i have enough data i need to back up as it is, terabytes and terabytes of it. i want my movies on stable blu ray discs that i can take anywhere. there isn't a day that goes by where i don't want to watch a movie on one of my 4 macs, and those movies just happen to be blu ray, not digital downloads and not dvd. how come every other computer manufacturer has a blu ray drive option? how the heck did they get around the "licensing issues" and software bugs? how come they allow their customers the ability to watch dvds, blu ray, and digital media on their computers?
i think its absurd to say that blu ray is a dying format and that everyone wants to download movies to their computer right now. i don't know ONE person that downloads movies to their computers as part of their movie collection, not one person. maybe music, a tv show, music video, podcast, or maybe a movie rental here and there for car trip, plane trip, or vacation, etc, but not their movie collection. and even if downloading our movies is in the near future, which it obviously is, we should still have a choice right now! not everybody is going to download their movies!
to me its really simple. blu ray drives should have been in all macs right from the get-go. apple is the largest tech company now. they have the ability to make blu ray happen if they wanted to, but they don't, which in my opinion is completely retarded and unbelievably annoying. jobs is trying to force people like me into downloading my movies. you can't do that!! he should be giving consumers a choice; dvd, blu ray, or digital download. thats it, give the public the option to choose. this shouldn't be a dicatorship!!
Ya reckon when SJ watches HD content on his home theater he uses garbage quality iTunes downloads? He'd be better off using Redbox DVD rentals and one of those up-scalers Toshiba used to dump through Wal-mart.
While I appreciate the Mac owner's desire for Blu-ray movie playback, can you imagine what an Apple branded solution would cost? I'm a huge fan of disney who is putting Blu-ray, DVD, and a digital copy in one blue case.
I use an iPod, an iPad, an iPhone and of course iTunes. I don't buy content from iTtnes when quality matters which includes music; rather I buy hybrid SACD or CD and ripping it lossless when jt needs to be mobile. Big Steve is right about the average consumer digging convenience. I'm far above Steve's target market in this case.
Remember the ludicrous "Format Wars" between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD? A huge marketing hype to get consumers that don't know better to buy into one format or the other?
And then, there were the rest of us that realized that the format wars had been been won, by downloadable or streaming content online, long before HD-DVD bowed out of the competition.
Well you can enjoy waiting a minute for the disc to load, I mean, for the disc to make sure you haven't "modified" your BD player, or update the firmware on your player to pointlessly patch the keys on it or be able to play the latest BS Java protection, or be forced to watch all the promos.
The rest of us will open up a file and be on our way
You are going t dismiss a format because it takes an extra minute to load a movie while ignoring. The hour or two it takes to download and or rip a movie
You apparently know nothing about Apple or else you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement. Apple is famous for NOT raising prices while at the same time improving the features and functions of the newest model (faster processors, more memory, speedier graphics, higher resolution screens) WITHOUT raising the price = providing even greater value!
I guess the now-$700 Mac Mini is excluded from this trend.
(Actually, I can't think of a single tech/CE company that has raised prices other than for volatile components like memory or displays. So Apple is hardly standing out here.)
Did you buy into HD-DVD? Your rhetoric rings of the bitterness of a former HD-DVD supporter. Or not, whatever. Give me Blu-ray audio/video quality I can download in an hour or less and I'll switch.
Interesting what people will read into a comment. No, I didn't buy into HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, and I won't. High definition video downloads aren't quite ready for prime time, but they are coming. That's one reason why Blu-ray doesn't have a long term future. I don't know if there will be another physical HD video format, but if there is, like I said, there won't be any moving parts. I think that something like that could blow Blu-ray out of the water. We'll see. Anyway, I rarely buy movies anymore; I just rent them from Netflix. I'm a first adopter of a lot of things, but I'm not likely to move to Blue-ray.
Remember the ludicrous "Format Wars" between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD? A huge marketing hype to get consumers that don't know better to buy into one format or the other?
And then, there were the rest of us that realized that the format wars had been been won, by downloadable or streaming content online, long before HD-DVD bowed out of the competition.
When you can legally download a movie that is even in the ballpark quality wise then you can talk, till then it is just vaporware
If it weren't for DRM and greedy license models, you could walk into a store with your 8GB thumb drive and load up on any rental movie you want in any "industry approved" format available. Well I spose you might need 32GB if your going the exact format of blu ray. Think about it:
- Environmental impact of all those optical media ELIMINATED
- Cost of new formats greatly decreased since the political license-technology war is moot
- New formats solidified much more quickly due to lack of aforementioned politics
- Stupid, bulky DVD packaging gone forever
- Convenience of loading (and UNLOADING, since it's easy to load) new movies via whatever medium you choose
But OH NOeeessss people might copy it. One day there will be no DRM. In the meantime, the consumer (and often the artist) continues to get slammed. I can't even copy music I made to my friends cause my damn iPod won't let me. Those who copy will continue to copy, with greater ease every day. Those who purchase will continue to purchase, with a small atrophy of those who only buy because they weren't savvy enough to copy. You can't stop the inevitable. You can only criminalize your customer base. Good luck DRM!
I do believe downloadable content will eventually take over. But for the next 5 years all Steve's comment does for me is swap the "bag of hurt" that is Blu-Ray for the "bag of hurt" that is Comcast. When am I going to get that cheap connection that lets me easily pull down 25 Gig (or whatever the exact figure is) high-def movies quickly, without stalls in the connection, and without hitting my bandwidth cap? I'm not seeing it soon.
The downloadable content and players (so far) haven't kept up with lossless audio either, at least not anything I've seen.
It's distressing that expectations of quality have actually gone down in regards to media since everything shifted to digital. Twenty five years ago we had CDs, and while they were hardly perfect they're certainly better than the lower-bitrate audio files being sold by the billions today (often at the same price as those on CDs). And video quality is suffering the same set-backs in regards to readily-available formats, namely 1080p. It will be a long time (and a lot of dollars both in bandwidth costs and outright purchase) before downloads match BD quality. Yet this is what people are willing to settle for.
The hardware necessary to support BDs is already bought and paid for inside your Macs, with only a marginal change to commodity components. The licensing and DRM is a sad fact of life, but much of it is a one-time cost that is dwarfed by the bandwidth costs that would go into downloading a few month's worth of 720p. For computers that can already spin a 12cm round piece of plastic it's stupid to not offer BluRay as an option.
I hope not. I have an optical drive with each of my computers and a optical drive is connected to each of my TV's. And the optical drive is the way I rip movies for my AppleTV.
Well you can enjoy waiting a minute for the disc to load, I mean, for the disc to make sure you haven't "modified" your BD player, or update the firmware on your player to pointlessly patch the keys on it or be able to play the latest BS Java protection, or be forced to watch all the promos.
The rest of us will open up a file and be on our way
I've never seen a Blu-Ray movie. I'm sure they look great but how great and at what price? I really enjoy DVDs on my computer. My 23" DVI connected screen at 1900 X 1080 plays those discs great. How much sharper can a video be? If I knew someone with a Blu-Ray screen I'd ask them to show me the same movie in Blu-Ray and DVD. I'd go rent the same movie in DVD format if they didn't have it just so I could see the difference.
It seems that vinyl records lasted quite a long time. At first they were made of brittle plastic of some sort. The grove was mono. Stereo groves were then invented and put onto the discs. Then they were made in durable flexible vinyl.
Eight track tapes came out and yet vinyl records endured. Cassette tapes came out and killed eight track tapes. Cassettes lasted twenty years on the market. Compact Discs (CD) came out and are still here. Digital copies have been around a few years and digital downloads are still growing as CDs are trailing.
DVDs are a great medium but they are in the same boat as CDs it's just taking longer for the market to get into saving or buying digital copies of movies. Maybe that won't happen as fast. If DVDs go away for digital downloads I don't think Blu-Ray will last any longer.
The thing I hate about CDs, CD ROMs, and DVDs is they degrade due to oxidation of the aluminum inside them. There are companies that make discs with gold as the recording medium. Since gold doesn't tarnish those should last as long as the plastic lasts. They cost a fortune.
My life is just fine without Blu-Ray discs. Perhaps they'll just end up being for videophiles.
Too many things in life are about price not quality. That is why I think Blu-Ray is destined to fail.
Comments
Yes, it was downright ugly on the BR and HD-DVD forums over at AVS, and wherever else it was debated. But to get back on topic, I'd buy a blu-ray equipped Mac in a second, but I'm not holding my breath. And on that note, good night to all.
Good night but for me it is mid afternoon
Steve Jobs is correct and Andy Parsons is an idiot. They rushed an incomplete format (Blu-ray) to market and it shows. There is no similarity between the introduction of DVDs and of Blu-ray. DVD video was a unified format and everyone got behind it. The reason it took a while to grow was that they didn't have much manufacturing capacity for DVDs and the failure rate was high in the beginning. Blu-ray and HD-DVD fought it ought in the marketplace, but it wasn't a real fight. Sony paid off movie studios to drop the HD-DVD format. It's really more of a repeat of the introduction of SACD and DVD-Audio. Both formats fought it out and like a movie cliche, killed each other at the end of the duel. There wasn't much advantage to consumers either: Music that couldn't be burned to an iPod, somewhat better audio quality, and surround sound mixes that were often completely unnatural.
If there will be another physical media for video, it will probably be a storage medium with no moving parts, holographic or flash memory-based. There might be some use for an Apple Blu-ray drive, but I'm not sure what it would be. 50 GB of slow optical storage doesn't get you very far as a backup medium. Good bye Blu-ray and good riddance.
Yes, I'm sure you would have gotten behind a MICROSOFT backed format using a MICROSOFT codec.
You need to get your facts straight. And no, I don't really either stupid format due to its DRM and other crap BOTH formats had.
Anyway, till then there's always my actual Blu-Ray player (part of my $30 Blu-Ray Sound Bar home theatre system). Or my brother's PS3. I don't know about others, but my family certainly gets more Blu-Ray movies from the movie store than iTunes rentals.
Glad legitimate buyers of bluray movies are subsidising this practice ...
P.S. Sorry for derailing the topic but the post rubbed me the wrong way.
Well you can enjoy waiting a minute for the disc to load, I mean, for the disc to make sure you haven't "modified" your BD player, or update the firmware on your player to pointlessly patch the keys on it or be able to play the latest BS Java protection, or be forced to watch all the promos.
The rest of us will open up a file and be on our way
I can't believe this is still the case. As for licensing, build it into the cost of an add-on BR option and let customers make the decision.
It would be one thing if most Macs didn't already have an optical drive of some sort, and Apple was hesitant to add something entirely new. But instead they added a SD card slot into the latest Mini while still including the standard DVD drive. Just add it as an option and see if customers are willing to pay for the upgrade. There's almost no risk for Apple to do so (especially on the already-expensive Mac Pro, which offers a second optical drive and other esoteric options such as a fibre-channel card!)
Personally, I think the main reason for no Blu Ray is that Stevo thinks it might eat into iTune video sales/rentals a little bit, and every little bit counts, so why offer the high image quality of Blu Ray, if you want people to buy movies from iTunes. The other arguments he offers sound pretty weak to me.
Excuse me but you seem to be the idiot. You apparently know nothing about Apple or else you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement. Apple is famous for NOT raising prices while at the same time improving the features and functions of the newest model (faster processors, more memory, speedier graphics, higher resolution screens) WITHOUT raising the price = providing even greater value! The other key factor about blu-ray is that the movies sold on these disks are ridiculously expensive! A ripoff by the studios. The benefit of watching blu-ray content on a smaller computer screen is minimal and not even worth arguing about. Its a large screen format.
$30 for a plastic bumper.
You're welcome.
i like blu ray cause i want to have media that i can watch on my computer, watch on my big screen 1080p tv, and bring to work or wherever the heck i want, without having to pay apple for hardware so that i can do the same thing with digital movies (ie apple tv). i don't want to worry about a huge digital movie collection stored on an unreliable hard drive. i also don't wanna have to worry about backing up that prospective digital movie collection on other hard drives to secure my investment. i have enough data i need to back up as it is, terabytes and terabytes of it. i want my movies on stable blu ray discs that i can take anywhere. there isn't a day that goes by where i don't want to watch a movie on one of my 4 macs, and those movies just happen to be blu ray, not digital downloads and not dvd. how come every other computer manufacturer has a blu ray drive option? how the heck did they get around the "licensing issues" and software bugs? how come they allow their customers the ability to watch dvds, blu ray, and digital media on their computers?
i think its absurd to say that blu ray is a dying format and that everyone wants to download movies to their computer right now. i don't know ONE person that downloads movies to their computers as part of their movie collection, not one person. maybe music, a tv show, music video, podcast, or maybe a movie rental here and there for car trip, plane trip, or vacation, etc, but not their movie collection. and even if downloading our movies is in the near future, which it obviously is, we should still have a choice right now! not everybody is going to download their movies!
to me its really simple. blu ray drives should have been in all macs right from the get-go. apple is the largest tech company now. they have the ability to make blu ray happen if they wanted to, but they don't, which in my opinion is completely retarded and unbelievably annoying. jobs is trying to force people like me into downloading my movies. you can't do that!! he should be giving consumers a choice; dvd, blu ray, or digital download. thats it, give the public the option to choose. this shouldn't be a dicatorship!!
While I appreciate the Mac owner's desire for Blu-ray movie playback, can you imagine what an Apple branded solution would cost? I'm a huge fan of disney who is putting Blu-ray, DVD, and a digital copy in one blue case.
I use an iPod, an iPad, an iPhone and of course iTunes. I don't buy content from iTtnes when quality matters which includes music; rather I buy hybrid SACD or CD and ripping it lossless when jt needs to be mobile. Big Steve is right about the average consumer digging convenience. I'm far above Steve's target market in this case.
$30 for a plastic bumper.
You're welcome.
Holy balls! You're not supended or banned yet?
And then, there were the rest of us that realized that the format wars had been been won, by downloadable or streaming content online, long before HD-DVD bowed out of the competition.
Well you can enjoy waiting a minute for the disc to load, I mean, for the disc to make sure you haven't "modified" your BD player, or update the firmware on your player to pointlessly patch the keys on it or be able to play the latest BS Java protection, or be forced to watch all the promos.
The rest of us will open up a file and be on our way
You are going t dismiss a format because it takes an extra minute to load a movie while ignoring. The hour or two it takes to download and or rip a movie
Excuse me but you seem to be the idiot.
No need for the ad-hom.
You apparently know nothing about Apple or else you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement. Apple is famous for NOT raising prices while at the same time improving the features and functions of the newest model (faster processors, more memory, speedier graphics, higher resolution screens) WITHOUT raising the price = providing even greater value!
I guess the now-$700 Mac Mini is excluded from this trend.
(Actually, I can't think of a single tech/CE company that has raised prices other than for volatile components like memory or displays. So Apple is hardly standing out here.)
Did you buy into HD-DVD? Your rhetoric rings of the bitterness of a former HD-DVD supporter. Or not, whatever. Give me Blu-ray audio/video quality I can download in an hour or less and I'll switch.
Interesting what people will read into a comment. No, I didn't buy into HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, and I won't. High definition video downloads aren't quite ready for prime time, but they are coming. That's one reason why Blu-ray doesn't have a long term future. I don't know if there will be another physical HD video format, but if there is, like I said, there won't be any moving parts. I think that something like that could blow Blu-ray out of the water. We'll see. Anyway, I rarely buy movies anymore; I just rent them from Netflix. I'm a first adopter of a lot of things, but I'm not likely to move to Blue-ray.
Remember the ludicrous "Format Wars" between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD? A huge marketing hype to get consumers that don't know better to buy into one format or the other?
And then, there were the rest of us that realized that the format wars had been been won, by downloadable or streaming content online, long before HD-DVD bowed out of the competition.
When you can legally download a movie that is even in the ballpark quality wise then you can talk, till then it is just vaporware
- Environmental impact of all those optical media ELIMINATED
- Cost of new formats greatly decreased since the political license-technology war is moot
- New formats solidified much more quickly due to lack of aforementioned politics
- Stupid, bulky DVD packaging gone forever
- Convenience of loading (and UNLOADING, since it's easy to load) new movies via whatever medium you choose
But OH NOeeessss people might copy it. One day there will be no DRM. In the meantime, the consumer (and often the artist) continues to get slammed. I can't even copy music I made to my friends cause my damn iPod won't let me. Those who copy will continue to copy, with greater ease every day. Those who purchase will continue to purchase, with a small atrophy of those who only buy because they weren't savvy enough to copy. You can't stop the inevitable. You can only criminalize your customer base. Good luck DRM!
The downloadable content and players (so far) haven't kept up with lossless audio either, at least not anything I've seen.
The hardware necessary to support BDs is already bought and paid for inside your Macs, with only a marginal change to commodity components. The licensing and DRM is a sad fact of life, but much of it is a one-time cost that is dwarfed by the bandwidth costs that would go into downloading a few month's worth of 720p. For computers that can already spin a 12cm round piece of plastic it's stupid to not offer BluRay as an option.
I hope not. I have an optical drive with each of my computers and a optical drive is connected to each of my TV's. And the optical drive is the way I rip movies for my AppleTV.
You do know there's another way...right?
Well you can enjoy waiting a minute for the disc to load, I mean, for the disc to make sure you haven't "modified" your BD player, or update the firmware on your player to pointlessly patch the keys on it or be able to play the latest BS Java protection, or be forced to watch all the promos.
The rest of us will open up a file and be on our way
Yeeessssssss
It seems that vinyl records lasted quite a long time. At first they were made of brittle plastic of some sort. The grove was mono. Stereo groves were then invented and put onto the discs. Then they were made in durable flexible vinyl.
Eight track tapes came out and yet vinyl records endured. Cassette tapes came out and killed eight track tapes. Cassettes lasted twenty years on the market. Compact Discs (CD) came out and are still here. Digital copies have been around a few years and digital downloads are still growing as CDs are trailing.
DVDs are a great medium but they are in the same boat as CDs it's just taking longer for the market to get into saving or buying digital copies of movies. Maybe that won't happen as fast. If DVDs go away for digital downloads I don't think Blu-Ray will last any longer.
The thing I hate about CDs, CD ROMs, and DVDs is they degrade due to oxidation of the aluminum inside them. There are companies that make discs with gold as the recording medium. Since gold doesn't tarnish those should last as long as the plastic lasts. They cost a fortune.
My life is just fine without Blu-Ray discs. Perhaps they'll just end up being for videophiles.
Too many things in life are about price not quality. That is why I think Blu-Ray is destined to fail.