Nice update generally. I'm very pleased that to all intents and purposes Firewire is back. Add Blu-ray and I'd buy now.
I've had enough of people asking this question or mentioning it when comparing PC's to Macs. "It doesn't play Bluray"
Think about it carefully. What is the purpose of BD right now? It's mainly used to play 1080p movies on BD players and PS3's all of which needs 32"+ screens to take full advantage of the image quality. Why would you really need BD players on 13", 15" or 17"? If I wanted to take advantage of 1080p movies I'd watch them on my 42" LCD with surround sound and not on my 13" Unibody MacBook. If you want to use it to store data then the better and quicker option is to use USB memory sticks. It's really a no brainer.
The other reason for Apple to hold out on bringing BD to its machines is the inevitable. Everyone knows that physical media formats are on the decline. It's all about downloading your songs, your movies and your games. Look at how the market is moving... Apple, Microsoft and Sony all implementing downloadable music, movies and games into their devices.
So please stop the BD nonsense now. It's past becoming annoying.
Patronising much?!!
The resolution is a non-point, even though you're wrong there too and 1080p is obviously better than 480p or 576p on a screen with a resolution that is higher than a DVD's, and one that which you are typically viewing much nearer than you are a TV.
The main point is that if I have a nice growing collection of BDs, as I do, I want to be able to play them on the next mac I buy. It doesn't matter you coming up with flawed academic reasons why I don't want to do that when I do want to do that!!
Do you expect me to buy every film I buy TWICE just so I can watch it on either my big HDTV or my laptop? If so, please excuse me while I laugh. I will happily accept I'm wrong if you promise to send me DVDs of every Blu-ray I buy from now on, but I warn you it'll cost you a lot because I like movies.
Downloads, meh, I'll not get past 2Mbps where I live in this decade. And even if everyone did get super-fast connections tomorrow, the quality is not as good and it's locked to Apple on iTunes - and that is why we don't have a Blu-ray option in macs yet IMHO, pure selfish self-interest from Apple. There are still people buying CDs, so it's not realistic to call time on physical media just yet, come back when all audio downloads are lossless / actual CD quality and then we might see downloads killing Blu-ray in another 3 or 4 years after that. Certainly long after these machines are well past being current.
It wouldn't kill apple to licence Blu-ray and offer it as an option to people who aren't so blinkered to its current advantages. It's pure politics, promoting their iTunes downloads to the small fraction of people who can or want to use it at the cost of providing their customers with the best mass-distributed option for movies currently out there.
