Phil Schiller Claims Customers Aren't Asking for Built-In Blu-Ray Anymore

[Tech198]

Originally Posted by Sue De Nimes

So when you said "other countries" you were not talking about other countries?

Gotcha.

correct.... Well... other countries meaning not U.S ... meaning Australia.

(Maybe i should have been more clear)

[Gizmotoy]

Originally Posted by marzer

Sorry if the analogy was difficult to comprehend {zoom} but I stand by it. A 27" screen is not by any strtetch of the imagination acceptable HT gear (regardless of the resolution) by contemporary standards. Now back in 1991...

I've been trying to figure out where you're coming from on this. Is your assumption in this assertion that this is for living room use, where you're something like 10 or more feet away from the display? I could agree with you in that case. At 10' with a 27" monitor, 480p, 720p, 1080p, and 4K will all appear identical (see graph posted on the previous page).

If you're at your desk with the 27" screen 2 - 3 feet away, I don't see how your claim can be anything but completely false (again, see graph). With a monitor of that size at that distance you will be able to easily discern the differences between 480p, 720p, 1080p, and even 4K (if the monitor's resolution supports it, which it doesn't, at this point).

[Sue De Nimes]

Originally Posted by Tech198

correct.... Well... other countries meaning not U.S ... meaning Australia.

(Maybe i should have been more clear)

Yep

[AidenShaw]

Originally Posted by marzer

Sorry if the analogy was difficult to comprehend {zoom} but I stand by it. A 27" screen is not by any strtetch of the imagination acceptable HT gear (regardless of the resolution) by contemporary standards. Now back in 1991...

The issue is simply "visual angle", or the "apparent size" of the screen - not the absolute dimensions of the screen.

If your screen is 5 metres away on the wall - it has to be really, really big to see the pixels.

However, a 24" screen half a metre way from your eyes is visually larger than the 46" screen at 5 metres.

Anyone who says that screen size alone is important to "appreciate HD" is merely parroting information that they don't understand. What counts is the screen size adjusted for the distance from the eyes to the screen.

Look at Optimum_HDTV_viewing_distance and the links....

You'll see that a 1920x(>=1080) 24" or larger desktop screen is great for HD when it's less than arm's length away.

[MidwestMacGuy]

Here's the problem. The quality of Blu Ray is far superior in every way compared to the best downloads possible, including iTunes. Period. No questions asked. Forget about it.

I've read several bloggers saying Blu Ray is expensive. True if you are talking buying one. The movie industry has made a very poor pricing decision for sure. But to rent? An iTunes movie at $4.99 or Redbox for $1.50, or Netflix for the month fee or about less than $3 a movie if you watch one a week. And did I say the quality is way better? It is.

While the compression algorithms have improved. None are nearly as good as the Blu Ray disk. All downloads are compressed HD. Most people would need a download speed near 50Mbs a second to begin to be able to watch a full HD movie. It is very expensive to get those speeds and much of the US can't.

It is mostly an uniformed public that cares less. If you have a surround sound system with quality audio components and a big TV there is no comparison. Take the outstanding John Mayer Live in Los Angeles CD produced by Danny Clinch. Not only is the video full 1080/24p, but the audio is uncompressed pcm 96khz/24bit. There is simply not enough bandwidth to download something like that easily and there won't be for at least another 5-10 years, if ever.

Taking Blu Ray out of a computer may make some sense. No one should watch a great movie or video sitting at a desk on a computer monitor. But make no mistake, a big screen TV and great sound system scream for Blu Ray, and with 4k the next big leap, forget about it. Downloads are hopelessly never going to be the way to view the very best. End of Story.

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Originally Posted by marzer

I just can't understand how anyone considering themselves a proponent of BR quality could possibly lay argue to the worthiness of such a inadequately sized screen for HD video viewing. I guess nothing more than arguing for the sake of argument.

Your retort about screen size strikes me as out of touch with reality for most people that watch blu-ray. MOST people DO NOT have 90-200" screens with external projectors (I happen to have a 93" screen, but trust me when I say that's not typical among the general population who want a single screen solution and those become unpractical, overly large for a given room aesthetics or too expensive for some to consider. Saying 60-65 inches is too small to enjoy Blu-Ray both ignores relative viewing distance (even his 30" monitor example bears mentioning there because at a computer desk, you tend to sit less than 2 feet from a monitor whereas in a living room it's typically 8-30 feet away or more and thus a 30" monitor can actually present a larger relative immersion size to your field of view than a 100" screen sitting 30 feet away (the latter is the equivalent of 480p while the 30" monitor can provide well over 1080p at that distance to the eye's resolving power)

The fact you don't even seem to know this begs the question of the competence of anything you are saying, really. A 30" screen showing 1080p at 2 feet will fully resolve. A 100" screen at 30 feet will most certainly NOT fully resolve 1080p to the human eye. Thus, screen size is immaterial without seating distance relative to displayed resolution since the human eye can only resolve so much detail at a given distance.

I suggest you take a look at this graph to see what I mean:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....tion_chart.jpg

Whether one would want to watch a movie two feet away is another question entirely (i.e there's more eyestrain at shorter distances, but then people routinely spend hours and hours on their computers playing games or surfing so clearly many don't mind), but seeing as this person said they DO sometimes watch movies at their desk, it makes sense to view them at as high a resolution as they can attain. This is why Apple has Retina displays on iPhones and iPads and now Macbooks. You generally have them closer to your eye than a TV and so you can see more resolution at those shorter distances.

And your comment about high powered sports cars in rush hour traffic make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER since that implies they are not allowed to use all their capability while a 30" screen can very well use all its capability at shorter viewing distances. I suggest you read up on this subject further.

Originally Posted by Xiroteus

I really wish companies would be more direct about things like this, we ALL know the reasons yet they state ridiculous reasons as to the reason. Of course I am not sure how you word it.

We at Apple do not wish to support blu-ray because we are cheap and wish you to spend all your money on over priced digital downloads.

That's akin to wishing politicians would be honest instead of constant liars about their true agendas. I don't believe a single one of them when they say they want to restore American to its former glory. You can't do that on a service economy based around Wal-Mart and McDonalds. It just doesn't work. Too bad they can't all be tried for purgery and thrown in prison for lying to their constituents.

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Originally Posted by MidwestMacGuy

Here's the problem. The quality of Blu Ray is far superior in every way compared to the best downloads possible, including iTunes. Period. No questions asked. Forget about it.

It's technically superior, but you're talking about the high-end and the average consumer simply doesn't care/notice, especially on the equipment and relative screen size/distances being used. Otherwise, they would NEVER watch a movie on Cable/Satellite, HBO, PPV, Netflix etc. because the quality isn't the same. Frankly, Apple TV's quality is far above most cable companies' PPV that I've seen, so at least it has that much going for it. The point is that people can and DO watch HD movies on those formats (often at 1080i or 720p at that, let alone the bit-rate/compression differences) and they still go "Wow! That's sharp compared to DVD!" because it IS sharper than DVD. H264 has further muddied the waters because its effects when bits run low is less noticeable than Mpeg2. The picture just goes "soft" for a moment when there's a lot of motion (the time you'd least notice that a "blur" isn't super sharp looking) whereas Mpeg2 (which a lot of cable boxes still use or something similarly crappy) go BLOCKY and that's instantly noticeable to most eyes.

One can make the same arguments about sound quality. It's hard to argue the merits of HD Audio when most consumers are listening to $200 (for all 5.1-7.1 speakers) systems that can't even do regular Dolby Digital any justice, let alone anything supposedly better (and I won't go into the arguments why compression is less sensitive for audio than video and how no one on the planet can tell 256 AAC from a WAV file when actually ABX tested so frankly, it's a bad comparison to start with, but the point is that consumers either don't notice or don't care or don't want to spend the money to get better quality so it's largely moot.

[SystemHasFailed]

Originally Posted by MagnusVonMagnum

That's akin to wishing politicians would be honest instead of constant liars about their true agendas. I don't believe a single one of them when they say they want to restore American to its former glory. You can't do that on a service economy based around Wal-Mart and McDonalds. It just doesn't work. Too bad they can't all be tried for purgery and thrown in prison for lying to their constituents.

There's something about you I like.. I just can't quite put my finger on it...

[krravi]

You know the iMac screen has a gorgeous resolution that even 1080p movies won't do justice to it.

So out of curiosity i went looking for 4k videos in Youtube. Well what do you know? Now the iMac's resolution is not enough for those videos !!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRGgV9GZN7k

If you want to really appreciate your iMac 27 or any retina device, check out the above video and any 4k video in youtube and be prepared to be immersed in the next dimension of HD....

Warning : A very good internet bandwidth is required for streaming the above.

NHK Japan is now broadcasting 8k videos called Ultra HD and has been accepted as the future standard.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...-def-tv-365291

Goodness ! our eyes are going to bleed at this rate...

[toke lahti]

This thread alone prooves that Schiller is wrong. Lots of people would like to watch bd-movies with Apple's products, built-in or not.

Btw, was that Mac Blu-ray Player the software, that needs active internet connection for playing a movie from local optical disc? Or was it some other software?

[toke lahti]

Originally Posted by toke lahti

Btw, was that Mac Blu-ray Player the software, that needs active internet connection for playing a movie from local optical disc? Or was it some other software?

Damn,
nobody reads this thread anymore...

Once again, I had time to read about 100 posts when this was fresh and once again it came to my mind, that I could pay a buck or two for the summary of 1000+ posts in this thread.
If there were a hundred others, someone could earn something out of this, at least in some developing country...

[Xiroteus]

Desktops should still have optical drives no question about that, however I am on the fence about laptops at the moment depending on the reasons. Just making it thinner it not really good enough alone, if they had kept the Macbooks the same size yet now we have more hard drive space, even larger battery etc... that would be appealing, yet for the most part it was just to make it thinner for that reason alone.

[Imhotep397]

Originally Posted by scoobydoo99

You don't own ANY of the Blu Ray movies you paid for! You were merely granted a license to WATCH them in private...

Optical media as a permanent license is one of the most idiotic things I've heard in a long time. You can not lend, trade sell or swap subscriptions...one of the more fundamental differences between physical media and subscriptions and its not very hard t spot. As I said once there's no physical media and you have to sign in to a service to see any kind of media that's when the price gouging will occur just like mobile phone and cable/Dish subscriptions. Having to subscribe to everything is just bad for consumers.

[katewes]

You people just don't get it. You think that by stating the benefits of Blu-Ray, that somehow Apple will think, "Oh yes, we need to give the customers what they want".

No, actually, this is how it happens.

Phil Schiller sits there, night and day, thinking: "How can Apple make more money".

Suddenly, he has a brain-wave for making more money, and - without asking customers - Apple does it.

Then Phil Schiller sits there, night and day, thinking, "How can I spin this to the customers to make them perceive that Apple was thinking of their needs".

Folks, that's how it happens.

That's why Phil gets paid so much money - and it's the reason why Phil is not going to listen to any customers.

Now, history shows that companies with that mentality can go bust in a few decades - i.e. the industrial titans of a few decades ago are nothing today - but Phil doesn't care since he'll be retired by then.

e.g. the 75% less reflective Retina/iMac screen - which still lets you see your reflection. Why didn't Apple use museum-glass technology to 100% remove the glare. Because Apple wants it slightly bit shiny to sell better. So Phil comes up with the spin that the new glass is 75% less reflective. But Phil, 5 years ago you told us that everyone LOVES glossy 100% reflective screens. So how come the story changes 5 years later? Spin, spin, spin. Five years ago Phil spins us that the glare is no big deal, and you can adjust the angle of the screen. Now 5 years later, Phil comes along with a 75% less reflective screen, and sells it as a benefit over the previously reflective screen. It's all spin, and Phil is the master of Apple-spin.

[toke lahti]

Originally Posted by toke lahti

.Btw, was that Mac Blu-ray Player the software, that needs active internet connection for playing a movie from local optical disc? Or was it some other software?

Nobody knows / remembers?

[wikus]

Yeah, nobody is asking for blu-ray cuz Apple basically forced that impression. They got rid of optical drives on the new iMacs and then they'll say 'noones asking for optical media, period'

Is Phil Schiller an idiot or just out of touch with reality?

[SystemHasFailed]

Originally Posted by wikus

Is Phil Schiller an idiot or just out of touch with reality?

Can't he be both?

[wikus]

Originally Posted by SystemHasFailed

Can't he be both?

I'd say yes and the more likely case.

[AnonMac50]

Even if people really stopped asking for it, simple, they gave up on Apple giving it to them.

[APlotdevice]

Originally Posted by katewes

Why didn't Apple use museum-glass technology to 100% remove the glare.

Even Museum glass alone is not 100% effective at removing glare. Museum do however have the advantage of having complete control over the angle at and intensity in which light hits the glass. That is what allows a good museum to practically eliminate glare.

[wonderspark]

For the record, I'd like my Macs to play Blu-ray discs.

If Apple had the option to include a BD burner in my Mac Pro, I would have paid them for it. Instead, I paid LG for mine, and installed it myself.

[Jaro65]

This is pretty hilarious. It is not like Apple listens to anything its customers ask for, so why ask in the first place? A lot of us wanted the SuperDrive to be Blu-ray compatible for years, and Apple did exactly nothing about it.

Is Phil also going to say one day that we are also no longer asking for floppy disk drives anymore?

[roadbloc]

Lawl. This thread is still active? I guess people are still bitter about the lack of Blu-Ray. Installed a Blu-Ray drive on my PC last week. Fantastic picture quality, certainly puts DVDs to shame.

Shame Apple put touting for iTunes sales before other formats.

[2IS]

Originally Posted by roadbloc

Lawl. This thread is still active? I guess people are still bitter about the lack of Blu-Ray. Installed a Blu-Ray drive on my PC last week. Fantastic picture quality, certainly puts DVDs to shame.

Shame Apple put touting for iTunes sales before other formats.

Well it wasn't active until the guy above you made a pointless post, the second half of which doesn't even make sense

[Premium1]

Originally Posted by likemyorbs

I don't have a bluray player in my house at all. Bluray movies are overpriced and inconvenient. I much prefer netflix streaming. The image quality is sharp enough for me.

Agree I have never purchased a blu-ray due to the price. Overpriced for what you get.