Blu-ray licensing
Typical Steve-talk defending the current lineup. When Blu-Ray/Touchscreen/Netbook Macs are released, he'll turn around and pretend like it was the best idea since sliced bread.
While I do really like the new Macs, I would really like to see a sub $800 compact Mac, with something like an iPhone OS (bare-bones).
All you have to do is google "blu-ray licensing" and you'll know exactly what Steve Jobs is talking about. It is a mess and includes both licensing and patent complications.
It is not at present a trivial matter, as some of the people on this forum seem to suggest, of just sticking a blu-ray drive into a piece of hardware and calling it good.
Here's a post from a user on another forum who, I thinks, begins to sum up some of the hurdles to overcome...
squiggleslash @ Oct 14th 2008 2:25PM
DisplayPort 1.1 is semi-compatible with HDMI, that is an HDCP-encumbered HDMI signal can be converted into a DisplayPort signal fairly simply. While it's not entirely analogous to DVI vs HDMI (DVI was electrically compatible with HDMI), it certainly would be no bad thing if TVs and receivers started having DisplayPort sockets instead of HDMI sockets and there would be no problem with people creating converter gadgets, as long as you're going HDMI-to-DisplayPort only, and not the other way.
The licensing issue with Blu-ray is convoluted, both from the point of view of there being no unified licensing authority, and the technical requirements needed to comply with the licenses.
For getting the required patents, the same problem nearly afflicted DVD, the DVD Forum eventually created the DVD6C, a one-stop-shop for most of the DVD patents and technologies. Anyone creating anything DVD related just goes to DVD6C and the MPEG LA and they're covered. The BDA lacks an equivalent.
For complying with the licensing, things get awkward because of the secure path requirements. All Blu-ray discs are encrypted using AACS, and a license to support AACS requires that from the moment the data is decrypted, it only pass through secure channels before being converted electrically into lights on a screen. When you own the whole widget, that's relatively easy to comply with. For standalone players, you control the OS on your player, and you just need to output the picture via HDMI encrypted with HDCP and you're covered.
But for a computer based player, it gets more awkward. Apple is going to have to make major architectural changes to Mac OS X to make it possible to play Blu-ray movies on a desktop machine without violating the AACS licenses. It's not impossible - part of the reason Vista has so many problems is that Microsoft has endured the same exercise and spent enormous amounts of time making digitally signed device drivers work, so an HD DVD player application could guarantee that it was talking to a real monitor and not some program pretending to be one. Given Microsoft's preferred format was dumped by Hollywood, they must be kicking themselves.
Apple are also in a similar position to Microsoft. They want digital downloads to succeed and see downloads as being the future. They "took a side" in the BD vs HD war, but appeared to have done so just to spite Microsoft (they backed Blu-ray), and have never actually turned their support into anything concrete. Which makes sense, because while Microsoft's support for HD DVD had some basis in it (HD DVD was designed to integrate into a digital downloads system, and indeed the "ghost" of HD DVD lives on as Xbox Live Marketplace which is almost entirely based upon HD DVD technology), Blu-ray is more of a rival to downloads than a friendly infrastructure, and as such Apple's support for the technology never made much sense.
I'd be surprised if Apple does anything with Blu-ray beyond support it as a disc storage system, at least in the near future.
