ive been saying this all along toke, im sure you are sick of it now - but i will say it again
- in my eyes, apple has made a product that satisfies ALL THREE of those "corners". they have satisfied this for the general consumer, which is where apples target market is. they are no longer aiming higher then that. i think the appleTV is wonderfully cheap, profile 3.1 is pretty decent for playback and convenience... well.. that speaks for itself.
Well, this thread is so "overbeating the undead horse" anyway, so if I'm still here, I can't be sick of anything here.
But I guess you're right, Apple satisfies all 3 corners for Average Joe. The problem is that when you establish your r&d with that, you are 5 years behind what enthusiast or early adaptor or professional wants.
And when you loose those, you start loosing the halo effect.
But maybe Apple doesn't even want more customers. They are doing just fine already.
This means that macs just turned from "bleeding edge" to "design class" like Rolls Royce or B&O.
Problem here is that only "bleeding edge" in IT is then Windows. Scary!
Maybe MB's will have bd when every other laptop has them with price half the cheapest MB. But I'm not satisfied with that schedule.
I'm writing this with laptop that costed €900 1.5 years ago and it has bd, eSata, ec slot & hdmi in addition to what MB's have.
Sure it has crappy screen, keyboard, drivers, Visva & it crashes all the time, but that's because of bad drivers and os.
If you'd add good drivers & os (X), added $500 for better quality hardware and $500 for Apple tax, that would be dream laptop for everybody for $2k.
But no luck, no avail.
So it can't be that Apple can't afford it. It has to be maximizing the profits (=greed) or/and limiting user options to keep them in the leach (=fear for competition).
Logically when macs have (cheap & unrelialble) dvd players, they could add
option for (expensive & unreliable(?)) bd drive, when mac users want it.
It shouldn't be Apple's decision if optical storage is old fashioned or not. Not more than they should limit people using mice or ethernet, because they are "obsolete".
If os would need "secure video path" in kernel they could add it easily or let the GPU handle the decryption after kernel.
Anyway they know, that now HDCP is cracked and slim drives are getting cheaper. In very near future people will have 3rd party bd drive in their MB's and some open source bd movie player software, which circumvents HDCP & AACS.
Movie studios now this and they also know that lots of people want quality, hard copies and ability to playback without computers. So they promote bd. It is most versatile. You can convert it to "digital download" or you can buy one with the disc. Apple wants to ristrict consumers usage of content more to keep them buying Apple's products. They see hard copies as a threat to their business.
And for iTunes movies being "good enough" quality, I think that has nothing to do with it. iTunes movies are what they are just for technical & economical reasons. If Apple could stream 1080p movies with high PQ, they surely would. It's just the reality distorsion field, that blinds people.
Again Apple's opinion was that 128kb mp3 was good enough, until they started selling something better.
AppleTV and AirPlay gets me interested when I can stream bd movie from my computers bd drive to tv screen.
TV is limited to profile 3.1.
