Steve Jobs Suggests Blu-ray Not Coming to Mac Anytime Soon

[Lumeswell]

It is not beneficial for Apple to add Blu-Ray drives. They promote a download service as one of their core business models and are trying to drive e-commerce over brick and mortar stores.

So he is basically admitting that downloading is not really attractive to the bulk of their customer base and that if they provide BR capable machines it would eat into their online sales.

I can understand keeping it out of the consumer end, but as a BTO for professional equipment for people who don't want to sit there watching movies but maybe want the backup option, or heaven forbid the ability to author for their clients, its just plain stupid.

I know I can get an external drive for that (so the bag of hurt is clearly not technical) and the professional audience will pay for it (so the bag of hurt is not financial), maybe that bag of hurt is just emotional scarring?

 

[DVD Plaza]

A lot of Blu-Ray discs flat out wouldn't work until I hooked my mac up to the blu-ray player (doesn't have WiFi so I had to share my internet connection) and wait a full 20 minutes for the Blu-Ray player to update. This is, in my opinion, broken. I never had to download updates for my DVD player. I never had to download updates for my VCR. I never had to download updates for my CD player etc etc... Broken.

How quickly we forget - in the early years of DVD we DID have to download updates for our DVD players. Not because the format was being improved or expanded, but because there were so many bugs as manufacturers tried to cope with (what seemed complicated at the time) the DVD specifications. Toshiba were one of the biggest culprits - every big release that came out required yet another update in order to work.

Blu Ray is a waste, the movies cost more and a player on a mac would drive apple computers and labtop prices up by at least $100

Again how quickly we forget - "Superdrives" were once an "option" only, and costed several hundred extra dollars to BTO. Those "Superdrives", which need renaming to "Supersededdrives", have since become standard issue.

I'm a wedding videographer that edits and authors on a Mac. I'd like Steve Jobs to tell my brides that the future of their wedding video is in downloads.

They are requesting BD, and I'll give it to them one way or another.

I edited my wedding video myself - full 1080 high definition from camera right through to editing in Final Cut Studio. But, four years later, I'm still screwed over - unable to actually do anything with all that edited video. Had I known Steve Job's "year of HD" was actually just a dead end I would never have purchased, and done all that work in, FCP... I think I'm just going to have to give in and start again, or use compressor to output the highest quality version possible and then use that video in Windows to create a Blu-ray. So much for the Mac being the ultimate tool for video work.


Personally I'm not too fussed about whether my MacBook Pro can play Blu-rays - but if Steve can't be assed supported it, then frankly just ditch the optical drive and be done with it because if we're not going to us a BD drive then sure as heck not going to use DVD. Give us more battery, i3 processor in 13", more RAM slots so it's cheaper to cram more memory in, and space for a second SSD (but like many many many many many many other issues you're letting OS X rot in a hole with, you could at least pull your finger out with TRIM support).

My iMac, however, is another story. Again the quality isn't an issue here, I just like to play a movie in the background while I'm doing my business accounts/etc. But with more than 70% of my movie collection now Blu-ray, I can't play many of my movies anymore! Aside from that though, there's no MAJOR spectacular reason to have BD - it's not the end of the world.

But to hear all the constant claims that there is little quality difference with BD, I can't help but pity what people must be looking at. On a 50" or 63" TV the difference is night and day, let alone on a projector spreading 3m across a wall. Sure downloads and streaming can get you "some" of the resolution at 720p, but it's heavily COMPRESSED. The few television shows I watch are all via downloads, and sure they look fine but then you watch an actual DVD (when compared to SD) to BD (when compared to HD) and it craps all over it... not to mention the lossless soundtracks and extras.

No doubt online distribution is the future, but it's easily 5-10 years away. Especially when a 10GB download would take god knows how many days on Australian broadband infrastructure, not to mention a single download of that size would immediately wipe out half of your allowance.

Whereas Blu-ray is today, with an extensive range that is growing by the week and selling like hotcakes - totally opposite of Steve's claim and comparison against the ill-fated HD audio formats (which I myself tried to point out would fail at their product launch here in AUS).

 

[Anuba]

As you've already admitted, Sweden is more or less a socialists utopia.

Erm... no, I said it was quasi-socialist, meaning there's residual stuff left over from the social democrats' era. A socialist's utopia, that would be... I dunno, Cuba?

Don't lump in the rest of Europe with them either. It isn't like that in the majority of Europe.

According to this list, the three countries where broadband is the cheapest are South Korea, Sweden and Japan.

 

[arkmannj]

Back up to a hard drive.

I'd still rather optical media, once the disks are burned they are more transportable and I don't have to worry about mechanical failure (if a BR drive fails I replace the drive but still have all me data in tact) also, if I want to share large amounts of data with a friend or loan a movie I still think the physical media is preferred, atleast to me.

also, my preference is to be as self reliant as much as possible, I feel lime I can do that better with physical media in my possession.

 

[-=XX=-Nephilim]

Well, listen...

Jobs might be right, in some distant future, we won't need BlueRay...

However, if I am spending my money on some rather expensive device TODAY I want value and features for my money...

In this case, having BlueRay drive instead of pile of junk that is current "super drive" would be awesome!

But no, Steve Jobs again proves his arrogance by deciding what WE want and need...

Typical

 

[Wreckem]

Erm... no, I said it was quasi-socialist, meaning there's residual stuff left over from the social democrats' era. A socialist's utopia, that would be... I dunno, Cuba?


According to this list, the three countries where broadband is the cheapest are South Korea, Sweden and Japan.

Your post illustrates what I said. On the whole, broadband in Europe is not similar to Sweden in terms of price and/or bandwidth. Hopefully Googles 1Gbps experiment pays off for the US.

 

[CreativeOutlaw]

Why would anyone want a hard copy? To me, it's like having a bank account. Would you rather have your employer pay you in hard cold cash or wire it automatically to your bank account? For personal purposes, hard copies of movies don't make sense. Why have piles of DVDs or Blu-Ray discs when you can just store them on an external HD? Discs take up space and I doubt you watch them very often. Apple should remove the SuperDrive all together from the MacBook/Pro and sell an external drive. Laptops will be thinner and small because of the extra space. Most of my friends don't have Blu-Ray players anywhere, computer or living room. You don't need 720P/1080P to have enjoy a good movie. It helps the experience but the cost is just too high.

Performing backups on Blu-Ray discs is simply a bad idea. You can do it with Time Machine and it's so much easier than backing up on Blu-ray discs. Most consumers don't even backup their data anyway. For the ones that do, Time Machine is easier and more intuitive than a Blu-Ray disc not to mention cost effective. I have to keep buying discs or buy an external hard drive and be done with it.

You're right on the money there. In addition, consider using the extra space by moving the superdrive external/optional to accommodate 2 hard drives (1 ssd for OS and programs, 1 big enough to store files) Everywhere I look the performance gains from SSD's are huge but by my calculations the cost of a single 500gb SSD (the size the average power user needs at a minimum) won't be affordable for at least 2-3 years. My HP laptop has 2 hd's in it and I can't wait to try replacing the OS/program HD with an SSD.

 

[Anuba]

Had I known Steve Job's "year of HD" was actually just a dead end I would never have purchased, and done all that work in, FCP...

Wasn't "the year of HD" more about Apple launching h.264 and QuickTime trailers in HD? I remember buying my first Mac (a Mini G4 1.42 GHz) around that time. Noticed all this noise about HD trailers and went to check them out, but the Mini wouldn't play them... well, they played but with a framerate of like 5-10 fps.

 

[tjanuranus]

How quickly we forget - in the early years of DVD we DID have to download updates for our DVD players. Not because the format was being improved or expanded, but because there were so many bugs as manufacturers tried to cope with (what seemed complicated at the time) the DVD specifications. Toshiba were one of the biggest culprits - every big release that came out required yet another update in order to work.


Again how quickly we forget - "Superdrives" were once an "option" only, and costed several hundred extra dollars to BTO. Those "Superdrives", which need renaming to "Supersededdrives", have since become standard issue.


I edited my wedding video myself - full 1080 high definition from camera right through to editing in Final Cut Studio. But, four years later, I'm still screwed over - unable to actually do anything with all that edited video. Had I known Steve Job's "year of HD" was actually just a dead end I would never have purchased, and done all that work in, FCP... I think I'm just going to have to give in and start again, or use compressor to output the highest quality version possible and then use that video in Windows to create a Blu-ray. So much for the Mac being the ultimate tool for video work.


Personally I'm not too fussed about whether my MacBook Pro can play Blu-rays - but if Steve can't be assed supported it, then frankly just ditch the optical drive and be done with it because if we're not going to us a BD drive then sure as heck not going to use DVD. Give us more battery, i3 processor in 13", more RAM slots so it's cheaper to cram more memory in, and space for a second SSD (but like many many many many many many other issues you're letting OS X rot in a hole with, you could at least pull your finger out with TRIM support).

My iMac, however, is another story. Again the quality isn't an issue here, I just like to play a movie in the background while I'm doing my business accounts/etc. But with more than 70% of my movie collection now Blu-ray, I can't play many of my movies anymore! Aside from that though, there's no MAJOR spectacular reason to have BD - it's not the end of the world.

But to hear all the constant claims that there is little quality difference with BD, I can't help but pity what people must be looking at. On a 50" or 63" TV the difference is night and day, let alone on a projector spreading 3m across a wall. Sure downloads and streaming can get you "some" of the resolution at 720p, but it's heavily COMPRESSED. The few television shows I watch are all via downloads, and sure they look fine but then you watch an actual DVD (when compared to SD) to BD (when compared to HD) and it craps all over it... not to mention the lossless soundtracks and extras.

No doubt online distribution is the future, but it's easily 5-10 years away. Especially when a 10GB download would take god knows how many days on Australian broadband infrastructure, not to mention a single download of that size would immediately wipe out half of your allowance.

Whereas Blu-ray is today, with an extensive range that is growing by the week and selling like hotcakes - totally opposite of Steve's claim and comparison against the ill-fated HD audio formats (which I myself tried to point out would fail at their product launch here in AUS).

the caps and prices/speeds in Australia are so dumb.

 

[decadentdave]

Wasn't "the year of HD" more about Apple launching h.264 and QuickTime trailers in HD? I remember buying my first Mac (a Mini G4 1.42 GHz) around that time. Noticed all this noise about HD trailers and went to check them out, but the Mini wouldn't play them... well, they played but with a framerate of like 5-10 fps.

That's why they call it Quicktime and not Realtime.

 

[Xtremehkr]

SJ is right, people spending ridiculous amounts of money building blu ray collections are going to find them collecting dust in a few years when it becomes so much more convenient to grab the remote and play any content you want to see on any variety of devices.

They're not going to put a BD player in an iPad, are they?

The MacBook Air is ahead of its time because it won't be too long before you start seeing a lot more laptops come with the option to leave out disc drives. I'd much rather see a lot more battery packed into that space, that way I would get more usable time without having to plug in.

BD stalwarts are denying reality if they think blu ray is going to be the main source of content delivery in 10 years.

Netflix is a clear indicator of where content delivery is going and Apple knows that.

 

[CreativeOutlaw]

How quickly we forget - in the early years of DVD we DID have to download updates for our DVD players. Not because the format was being improved or expanded, but because there were so many bugs as manufacturers tried to cope with (what seemed complicated at the time) the DVD specifications. Toshiba were one of the biggest culprits - every big release that came out required yet another update in order to work.


Again how quickly we forget - "Superdrives" were once an "option" only, and costed several hundred extra dollars to BTO. Those "Superdrives", which need renaming to "Supersededdrives", have since become standard issue.


I edited my wedding video myself - full 1080 high definition from camera right through to editing in Final Cut Studio. But, four years later, I'm still screwed over - unable to actually do anything with all that edited video. Had I known Steve Job's "year of HD" was actually just a dead end I would never have purchased, and done all that work in, FCP... I think I'm just going to have to give in and start again, or use compressor to output the highest quality version possible and then use that video in Windows to create a Blu-ray. So much for the Mac being the ultimate tool for video work.


Personally I'm not too fussed about whether my MacBook Pro can play Blu-rays - but if Steve can't be assed supported it, then frankly just ditch the optical drive and be done with it because if we're not going to us a BD drive then sure as heck not going to use DVD. Give us more battery, i3 processor in 13", more RAM slots so it's cheaper to cram more memory in, and space for a second SSD (but like many many many many many many other issues you're letting OS X rot in a hole with, you could at least pull your finger out with TRIM support).

My iMac, however, is another story. Again the quality isn't an issue here, I just like to play a movie in the background while I'm doing my business accounts/etc. But with more than 70% of my movie collection now Blu-ray, I can't play many of my movies anymore! Aside from that though, there's no MAJOR spectacular reason to have BD - it's not the end of the world.

But to hear all the constant claims that there is little quality difference with BD, I can't help but pity what people must be looking at. On a 50" or 63" TV the difference is night and day, let alone on a projector spreading 3m across a wall. Sure downloads and streaming can get you "some" of the resolution at 720p, but it's heavily COMPRESSED. The few television shows I watch are all via downloads, and sure they look fine but then you watch an actual DVD (when compared to SD) to BD (when compared to HD) and it craps all over it... not to mention the lossless soundtracks and extras.

No doubt online distribution is the future, but it's easily 5-10 years away. Especially when a 10GB download would take god knows how many days on Australian broadband infrastructure, not to mention a single download of that size would immediately wipe out half of your allowance.

Whereas Blu-ray is today, with an extensive range that is growing by the week and selling like hotcakes - totally opposite of Steve's claim and comparison against the ill-fated HD audio formats (which I myself tried to point out would fail at their product launch here in AUS).

I wonder if in the future we'll see companies like Netflix and Apple (who need to provide quick large file downloads) set up their own bittorrents, where 50 of their servers each seed part of a movie to you to speed things up considerably.

 

[iEdd]

The MacBook Air is ahead of its time because it won't be too long before you start seeing a lot more laptops come with the option to leave out disc drives. I'd much rather see a lot more battery packed into that space, that way I would get more usable time without having to plug in.

The Powerbook G3 Pismo was awesome in that respect. Pull the left lever, main battery pops out. Pull the right lever, optical drive pops out. You could either replace the optical drive with an empty box/cover, or add a second battery.

 

[willybNL]

downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes)

So, now again, the same Question, for the rest of the of world, outside the USA.

No Hulu here, no iTunes movies here. Yes, in the number 4 country where internet is really really fast!
BluRay is the only option to get HDTV movies here, legally.

What is so difficult for a combo-DVD writer/BlueRay reader.

 

[D-Love]

I have no problem with this. Blu-Ray is not so much a storage medium as it is for home theater. I've got a dedicated theater with a 70 inch screen and full 7.1 surround. Blu-Ray shines in that setting so much more than streaming. Not really a place for it on Macs or PCs IMO. Disks are a clunky storage device and optical media will be going the route of the floppy eventually.

 

[Wreckem]

I wonder if in the future we'll see companies like Netflix and Apple (who need to provide quick large file downloads) set up their own bittorrents, where 50 of their servers each seed part of a movie to you to speed things up considerably.

If the movie studios have anything to say, which they are hoping to, it will be piped to you directly through your cable or teleco provider, cutting out Apple/Netflix et al.

They are already in the trial phases of having movies launch on VOD day and date of the theatrical release.

 

[lilo777]

From the reactions, it's clear they don't get that part of the equation.

What's there to get? Name me one application for which there is no counterpart on Windows platform because of the DRM issues. There is none. For each application on OS X there is at least 10 counterparts on Windows. Then of course there are tons of Windows applications for which there is no similar apps on OS X (like playing BluRay disks )

 

[one09jason]

Oh, yeah. Perfect.

"Hey, Jim-Bob. Here's my iPad. It has [blank] movie on it. You can borrow it. Just give it back to me when you're done."

And here we arrive at the real reason, I think. No one makes any money when you loan you blu-ray disk to Jim-Bob.

 

[DylanLikesPorn]

So because he won't support a standard that you want him to, You vilify someone.

Think different.

 

[Repo]

I edited my wedding video myself - full 1080 high definition from camera right through to editing in Final Cut Studio. But, four years later, I'm still screwed over - unable to actually do anything with all that edited video. Had I known Steve Job's "year of HD" was actually just a dead end I would never have purchased, and done all that work in, FCP... I think I'm just going to have to give in and start again, or use compressor to output the highest quality version possible and then use that video in Windows to create a Blu-ray.

You can burn to Blu-ray in FCS now, or you could export your FCP project to Adobe Premiere, and output to Blu-ray from there.

 

[hms84]

Apple wants to force Mac users to buy from iTunes, that's why they won't add any BD in there macs.

 

[JAT]

SJ is right, people spending ridiculous amounts of money building blu ray collections are going to find them collecting dust in a few years when it becomes so much more convenient to grab the remote and play any content you want to see on any variety of devices.

They're not going to put a BD player in an iPad, are they?

The MacBook Air is ahead of its time because it won't be too long before you start seeing a lot more laptops come with the option to leave out disc drives. I'd much rather see a lot more battery packed into that space, that way I would get more usable time without having to plug in.

BD stalwarts are denying reality if they think blu ray is going to be the main source of content delivery in 10 years.

Netflix is a clear indicator of where content delivery is going and Apple knows that.

Seriously, research SOMETHING before you post. Anything, for pity's sake.

• The main source of content delivery is still TV and radio. Has been for many decades. Will be for quite some time. Be serious, really.
• DVD is only 13 years old.
• BD is 4 years old. In 10 years, it will be older than DVD is today. Any such tech would be happy to last that long.
• Just read the details throughout this thread about broadband content delivery and its trials.

 

[one09jason]

Streaming a movie I could OWN for keeps is like running the water while I'm not home.

Yeah, and you know what, most people assume that moving electrons is free, as if downloading all those bits does not require any energy. It does, just ask Google what their power bill is. Every time you download something, you're burning coal (the dominant source of electrical power in the US).

 

[Krauser]

How's that unlimited streaming working out for you?

You know what you're going to do when you download 10 movies you want to keep forever? Buy a 2nd or 3rd or 4th iPad and keep them on all of them? Or erase it and if you want to watch it again or someone else in your household wants to watch it after you've erased, redownload it again?

"Steve, you magnficiant bastard, you make my life easier!!! "

How it is now, one can obtain a 1TB drive for very cheap so storage isn't an issue. Besides, when I get DVD's I just end up ripping them to my HDD anyway with HandBrake so they become digital anyway. Besides why wouldn't you want digital copies of the same source quality from a rip? You never have to worry about your disc wearing out or scratching. Plus, if you run out of room you can just buy more space for cheap. It's not that big of a deal really, to me at least.

Now I completely understand the whole cap thing with certain countries and their ISPs but here in NJ on Optimum, grabbing an entire file for download of an HD movie isn't really an issue and streaming HD video is flawless (for me and my area at least) so I can understand where Jobs is coming from. We have come to the point where the price for large amounts of storage is almost a non-issue and the technology exists to easily allow the transfer of HD content quick enough for the vast majority of consumers.

For me at least, and it is just my opinion and situation, I prefer digital distribution and digital media in general to the physical counterpart. Also, the music in my library, although being originally on discs, is now entirely digital and the discs are who the hell knows hahaha so I have embraced this whole digital era. It's just easier not worrying about where you left that physical disc and once you find it worry about whether its in good enough condition to still play the desired files. For me at least, this simplicity outweighs the negative of storage concerns (unless of course BluRays start seeing mass appeal as writable personal storage or a backup medium which, once again, still isn't yet the case due to how cheap HDD's and other storage are for the storage they offer in return).

 

[pol0001]

I can understand Steve Jobs reasoning. In the future we will most likely download movies instead of buying them. But I live in the Netherlands, where I even can't buy music videos in iTunes right now. The only "online movie source" for me would be illegal torrent sites.