Why are you the pot calling the kettle black here about bitching? Learn some respect before spewing given you just removed all doubt.
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Job's said it was a bag of hurt, yet ...
- Thread starter phrehdd
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I think you're correct on most of your points. "Apple went for their thin at all cost motto" is among them but you seem to use it derisively. When put into context I think this "motto" has given us much of the hardware we now take for granted. It directly gave us the iPad, Watch, AirPods and MacBooks, and also some competing devices.
At the time of the initial "bag of hurt" quote, the MacBook Air had just been released. Apple engineers in hardware and software were busy with the iPad and iOS(iPhone OS). Mac OS(Mac OS X) would have no new features as it needed a "house cleaning" so Apple could cross develop with the new mobile sibling OS. The planned 'post PC' device would have no room, or power, for cd drives. Apple needed to promote digital downloads as this would drive it's audio, video and soon software sales. Bluetooth was a nuisance, an advanced relic that had to be shot.
At the time of the initial "bag of hurt" quote, the MacBook Air had just been released. Apple engineers in hardware and software were busy with the iPad and iOS(iPhone OS). Mac OS(Mac OS X) would have no new features as it needed a "house cleaning" so Apple could cross develop with the new mobile sibling OS. The planned 'post PC' device would have no room, or power, for cd drives. Apple needed to promote digital downloads as this would drive it's audio, video and soon software sales. Bluetooth was a nuisance, an advanced relic that had to be shot.
We agree on some (most) items but not all but first and foremost - thank you for a pleasant discourse here.
I am unsure that there was a "must" to get rid of the optical drive in order to make a path to other devices. The iPad could have just as easily borrowed technology from the iPhone side. Then again, Apple (talking of other methods to handle data) wasn't really all that keen on the iPhone or iPad having memory "flash" card slots. If I recall correctly (if not feel free to let me know) that Apple wants to do away with them on computers as well now.
My original post merely was pointing out that in spite of claims about a bag of hurt, about the media being "dead" years have past and the latest incarnation of optical drives is coming out with a well known player investing in it. Again, thank you for your exchange of thoughts here.
[QUOTE="phrehdd, post: 24262368, member: 241695
My original post merely was pointing out that in spite of claims about a bag of hurt, about the media being "dead" years have past and the latest incarnation of optical drives is coming out with a well known player investing in it. Again, thank you for your exchange of thoughts here.[/QUOTE]
phredhdd,
I can see your point and I would agree with you on some of your ideas but the whole problem that I have had from the start of this thread and one that many others have is you keep using his quote incorrectly. Let's imagine for a minute a situation. Let's say that I'm a restaurant owner and I say I hate spaghetti and we are not going to sell it anymore. Later someone comes along and says "That guy said he hates pasta". Is that what was said? No, it wasn't. It is similar but similar things aren't always the same. Maybe I love love ravioli but not spaghetti so it would be incorrect to say that I hate pasta. Jobs' quote that you keep throwing around is solely about Blueray. He didn't do away with optical discs even anywhere near the time of this quote so please find another quote to back up your argument and please stop using it to try to support your argument. I think that there are plenty of other ways to strengthen your argument without having to take something out of context. It distracts people. Did Steve have plans to do away with optical discs all together? Maybe but you need to provide a different quote because Blueray doesn't equal optical discs. Blueray is one type of optical disc but optical discs aren't always Blueray.
My original post merely was pointing out that in spite of claims about a bag of hurt, about the media being "dead" years have past and the latest incarnation of optical drives is coming out with a well known player investing in it. Again, thank you for your exchange of thoughts here.[/QUOTE]
phredhdd,
I can see your point and I would agree with you on some of your ideas but the whole problem that I have had from the start of this thread and one that many others have is you keep using his quote incorrectly. Let's imagine for a minute a situation. Let's say that I'm a restaurant owner and I say I hate spaghetti and we are not going to sell it anymore. Later someone comes along and says "That guy said he hates pasta". Is that what was said? No, it wasn't. It is similar but similar things aren't always the same. Maybe I love love ravioli but not spaghetti so it would be incorrect to say that I hate pasta. Jobs' quote that you keep throwing around is solely about Blueray. He didn't do away with optical discs even anywhere near the time of this quote so please find another quote to back up your argument and please stop using it to try to support your argument. I think that there are plenty of other ways to strengthen your argument without having to take something out of context. It distracts people. Did Steve have plans to do away with optical discs all together? Maybe but you need to provide a different quote because Blueray doesn't equal optical discs. Blueray is one type of optical disc but optical discs aren't always Blueray.
I just think Steve Jobs is not a person to quote, on business matters. He had his own agenda to push that often meant trashing any competition he saw. He was the first to officially support the "ripping and burning". And got into trouble for it.
Any opinions Steve Jobs said may not be relevant the day after he said it.
there's those uhd-bluray things, somebody had to come out with an external disc drive for them. they produce them for set-top player anyway, so why not put them in an usb-enclosure? they'll sell a few, but it's the niche within the niche. i'm doing video stuff, and i had to do a lot of dvds back in the day, but nobody has ever asked me about a blu-ray (but i still get the occasional request for a dvd). i've heard about a friend who had to deliver a short film to a cinema on video blu-ray, but that's about it. i got a blu-ray burner myself, but have never used it for an actual blu ray. as for uhd-blu ray... there's no "consumer grade" burner available that i know of and professional authoring software runs in the tens of thousands of dollars per license. so the "bag of hurt" comment probably became true for most people.
besides license cost and hardware size, there are failure rates (of drives and media), medium size/capacity/robustness, read/write-speed, the number of write cycles, hardware cost, etc... that all together make a pretty good argument against building an optical disk drive into a computer, as long as better alternatives (e.g. usb drives) are available. when was the last time you saved data on an optical disc?
the situation was different at the time with CDs and DVDs - flash storage still didn't have enough capacity and was too expensive - and there was no high-quality alternative for CD-Audio or DVD-Video so it made more sense to include playback software at the time.
blu-ray is not nearly as popular, as dvds were and still are, and it didn't even get enough traction in the beginning, when legal streaming alternatives were not really an industry backed alternative - because it made more sense for people to just rip dvds and record tv and distribute that over harddrives or the internet. blu-ray video playback on a computer is even more of a niche thing, so even when you ignore licensing costs, it's understandable that apple doesn't care about it and requires you to buy an external drive by a third party vendor and pay the license fee for the software yourself. as for the fact that there's no external blu-ray superdrive - that might be because of licensing fees, and steve jobs not wanting to pay them, but nowadays, they'd just make them 50$ more expensive if they'd think they had to make one.
btw., osx supports burning blu-ray disks and you can even encode blu-ray video with apple's compressor.
besides license cost and hardware size, there are failure rates (of drives and media), medium size/capacity/robustness, read/write-speed, the number of write cycles, hardware cost, etc... that all together make a pretty good argument against building an optical disk drive into a computer, as long as better alternatives (e.g. usb drives) are available. when was the last time you saved data on an optical disc?
the situation was different at the time with CDs and DVDs - flash storage still didn't have enough capacity and was too expensive - and there was no high-quality alternative for CD-Audio or DVD-Video so it made more sense to include playback software at the time.
blu-ray is not nearly as popular, as dvds were and still are, and it didn't even get enough traction in the beginning, when legal streaming alternatives were not really an industry backed alternative - because it made more sense for people to just rip dvds and record tv and distribute that over harddrives or the internet. blu-ray video playback on a computer is even more of a niche thing, so even when you ignore licensing costs, it's understandable that apple doesn't care about it and requires you to buy an external drive by a third party vendor and pay the license fee for the software yourself. as for the fact that there's no external blu-ray superdrive - that might be because of licensing fees, and steve jobs not wanting to pay them, but nowadays, they'd just make them 50$ more expensive if they'd think they had to make one.
btw., osx supports burning blu-ray disks and you can even encode blu-ray video with apple's compressor.
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Blu-ray is great! Great for picking up cheap titles in the supermarket then ripping them and transcoding them into mp4 format for use on my Apple TV!
To paraphrase another of Steve Jobs's quotes, you gotta get 'em and put 'em away and you lose 'em, yuck!
To paraphrase another of Steve Jobs's quotes, you gotta get 'em and put 'em away and you lose 'em, yuck!
I have a BluRay player in my Windows media PC connected to the TV. For as long as optical discs are available, I will be buying them. But BluRay in Windows isn't the easiest way of watching them. For a start you have to keep buying new software every few years as they keep changing the encryption in BluRay and after a while software companies stop providing updates for old versions. I bought WinDVD when I upgraded to Windows 10 as my previous player didn't work in 3D with Windows 10 (which is fair enough). But once they stop providing updates for the version I have, I will just do what I did last time and buy the movie off Amazon and then download the ripped version off P2P.
Ironically, in the past few years I have found myself using optical disks more and more, as they've become the most practical archival storage medium for what I do. If they follow through with the 600 GB and 1,000 GB BluRay disks designed specifically for archival storage, I will purchase whatever external drive is needed to rip them.
Depending on what you are doing and who you are talking to - a Terabyte is either 1000 gigs OR as it was before, 1024 gigs. Thus there is nothing wrong with saying 1000 gigs.
I'm honestly not sure lol
I guess in the back of my mind I wanted to be consistent in the measurement unit, as when I was typing it I almost typed .6 TB and 1 TB.
Data moves faster from a disc or thumb drive than it does to and from the cloud.
HUH?!
Sony developed the Optical disk and they have the patents and rights to just above all iterations. The very first version is the CD that most people across the globe see ... but what many don't recall is the Data-Mini-Disc what was used by digital desktop publishing or graphic artists and a very forward thinking DJ producer 'Mantronix' who made the VERY FIRST album completely sourced and recorded fully digitally using this medium.
Hint: The Matrix (original)
you can see the guy trying to buy mescaline from Mr. Anderson, in which Anderson hands him the disk before seeing the 'white rabbit' on the shoulder of his girlfriend.
Either way that's history ... bandwidth increases for high-speed residential internet flourishing, USB Disk drivers more universal and faster with plug-in/play without extra hardware really killed the optical disk.
Nintendo sticking to flash disks in the upcoming Nintendo Switch = faster load times and better storage sizes without slow read/write speeds required for a spindle-based medium.
Trust it I LOVE Mini-Disk and that I can record digitally with the ability on the fly to create T-Marks to seperate a DJ mix/live session into separate tracks and yet edit those later own without affecting the master digital recording (or quality) - it's just marks in the TOC partition of the disk. something I wish our iPhones/iPod's etc could do today.
Don't worry the movie Digital Laser Disc will sing on sweetly in history.
I can think of one. I do like to buy physical CDs sometimes, especially from musicians who are either on tour and sell CDs so they can come out ahead of their tour expenses. Other than that, the optical disk has pretty much outlived its usefulness. They don't store enough to be a great backup option and they're too slow in that regard anyway.
Well, I also like to have software I purchase on a CD format. I find it to be easier whenever I need to reinstall something years later.
As for the whole BluRay thing... I never owned a single BluRay disc. I never felt the need to go there and the whole BluRay thing has always confused me. I'm not obsessed with movies so the extra cost of going to BluRay never appealed to me when the existing product was good enough for my needs.
As long as we're having a meltdown over not having BluRay in Macs, let's fire up the rage about the new MBP not having a turntable to play vinyl.
I'm still enjoying my 'bag of hurt' discs, even if Apple stopped support several years ago for the computers I originally wanted official Blu-ray movie playback on. Blu-ray sure outlived those obsolete macs that were supposedly 'the future' way of watching movies, so I was told a decade ago. Oh well.
I remember MiniDisc not going anywhere beyond a small clique of enthusiasts and the data version never getting anywhere at all - the reasons why are pretty much set out in the Wikipedia entry. Also, there were already several other magneto-optical disc formats around before the Data MiniDisc - I remember using 3.5"/90mm M/O disks (not MiniDisc) in the early 90s and there were 5"/130mm versions widely used for CD-ROM authoring in the days before cheap CD-Rs.
Steve Jobs' NeXT cube (arguably more the ancestor of modern Macs than the Macs of the day) used a 130mm Magneto-Optical drive.
I was always surprised that Sony never pushed MiniDisc as the obvious replacement for their 3.5" floppy - but they went with an optically-tracked "floptical" instead for the sake of backward compatibility. Plus, there was no "king maker" that could anoint a new drive by building it into their PCs the way IBM and Apple did with the 3.5" floppy in the 80s: in the mid 90s, IBM were effectively dead as a PC maker, and Apple were at their lowest ebb. Oh, and DOS PCs still needed a floppy drive as a boot medium - even booting from CD, where available, used a floppy disc "image" on the CD.
Then CD-R took off: a horrible medium for storing data but with a price-per-megabyte that made it a no-brainer.
Re: theluggage -
Thanks for the reminder of all the various forms of media that have been around for storage and transferable data. I suppose it really came down to either one replacing another type or a shake out of multiple forms that tried to take the market with only a few succeeding.
Some things I remember quite well (only mentioning some popular items for brevity and by no means a complete list)
3.5" floppy pushing out use of 5.24 floppies
small cartridge style drives pushing out floppies for backups of "large" data (such as Jazz drives)
small businesses going with small tape drive with rotation (pushing out various mediums such as WORM drives)
CD drive technology replacing 3.5" for installations of many software and as inexpensive small "large data" back up.
DVD pushing out CD for various software install and some data backup
and the list goes on...
What remained in place was that small media continued usually along the optical disc line and later, we could add thumb drives. External hard drives have their niche as well. Tape drives remain within the business market and is rare with the typical consumer market.
Thanks for the reminder of all the various forms of media that have been around for storage and transferable data. I suppose it really came down to either one replacing another type or a shake out of multiple forms that tried to take the market with only a few succeeding.
Some things I remember quite well (only mentioning some popular items for brevity and by no means a complete list)
3.5" floppy pushing out use of 5.24 floppies
small cartridge style drives pushing out floppies for backups of "large" data (such as Jazz drives)
small businesses going with small tape drive with rotation (pushing out various mediums such as WORM drives)
CD drive technology replacing 3.5" for installations of many software and as inexpensive small "large data" back up.
DVD pushing out CD for various software install and some data backup
and the list goes on...
What remained in place was that small media continued usually along the optical disc line and later, we could add thumb drives. External hard drives have their niche as well. Tape drives remain within the business market and is rare with the typical consumer market.
But you forget that all of that is based on a free and functional internet.
Given the current administrations efforts to turn the internet into yet another profit center for greedy corporations already flush with cash and bloated management teams, declaring the death of physical media is likely premature.
I mean, if I have to pay the same, or more, to get streaming content that is available on an 'archaic plastic disc', I'll choose the plastic disc. Call me old fashioned, but I'm not stupid.
PLUS if there is no way to actually save the streaming content, which seems to be the industry bent (from yet another bloated industry that has way to much cash and far too many managers), I'm still going to be buying that 'archaic plastic disc' for as long as I can.
[doublepost=1487776539][/doublepost]
Funny that I saw a MiniDisc backup changer, that held cartridges of the little things and swapped them in and out like the older and ancient tape auto-loaders. As I remember it, the company that had one loved it. But that could be the old 'VHS/Betamax' war. The lesser won...
Oh, and on Sony: There is a company that has such a history of shooting themselves in the foot, arm, hand, leg, and head. I read that partly due to their stupidity, they killed the WalkMan to save their music label profits, and ended up with lower amounts of BOTH of them.
Oh, Data MiniDisc existed - it just never gained traction. Plus, this time round, Sony themselves were making Betamax and VHS and Video2000... (or rather DAT, 8mm tape and optically-tracked superfloppies).
Data in the "Cloud" means that our very VERY trustworthy Government
can access it, and DELETE it !! I expect pushback on cloud storage. And more people who will want to store their data at home or office.That's not coming from some California hippie CO2 scientist, that's coming from from an IT Admin with 30 years experience who for the first time EVER is suddenly being asked by clients to co-locate servers in Canada instead of the US because of, uh... concerns.
As far as Jobs statements on BluRay bag of hurt. I remember that as the first time that Apple chose to serve Apple instead of customers. Which is now an epidemic in Cupertino.
Data in the "Cloud" means that our very VERY trustworthy Government
That's not coming from some California hippie CO2 scientist, that's coming from from an IT Admin with 30 years experience who for the first time EVER is suddenly being asked by clients to co-locate servers in Canada instead of the US because of, uh... concerns.
As far as Jobs statements on BluRay bag of hurt. I remember that as the first time that Apple chose to serve Apple instead of customers. Which is now an epidemic in Cupertino.
Your words ring true.
I think that the original reason they didn't include BluRay support was true, the decision to remove optical drives altogether seems to have more to do with getting rid of moving parts, as they tend to be the failing part in any computer.
Hopefully the will carry on with this trend and get rid of spinning HDs too.
Hopefully the will carry on with this trend and get rid of spinning HDs too.
Actually I think it was about having to pay royalties to the Blu-Ray consortium. Apple (Steve Jobs) hated paying for anything they (he) didn't think was worth it. Apple continued/continues to support DVD drives, so refusing to support Blu-Ray sounds like another Jobs snit over money. I mean, hell, the man refused to pay for his own daughters education, and provide a home for her and her mother. Why they still haven't might be just on principle.
Either way, I have a MacPro that has a Blu-Ray drive in it, and it actually works, although finding a player app for it was difficult.
I used an external USB3 Blu-Ray drive and used MacGo Mac Blu-Ray Player back in the day! Today I use it to rip those disks to save on networked NAS to play them.