First, I find it very nice that we once in a while have very intelligent discussion in this thread after all the posts and years.
Agreed; let's hope that it can stay that way.
When you look usb-sticks as replacement of optical discs, there's two very important aspects in addion to price:
1. Write-once
Very important for archival to remove the human error of accidentally erasing data.
2. Universal standard
Every gadget on the planet that has dvd- or bd-drive, can playback dvd-video.
There's no file format for video, that will work as universally as dvd.
It doesn't matter if the file is in usb-stick or online.
Agree on several of these points...not without any reservations though, since on #2, one can argue that USB is more ubiquitous today than physical optical drives, although you're spot-on on the file format & playback part.
Dvd has worked fine for past 15 years, but if you want high definition blu-ray will be the next universal standard.
Looks like there won't be any universal file format to compete.
Patent issues with html5-video are not going away soon.
More patent headaches...oh wonderful. Yet another risk to business and nostalgic pining for the "Good Old Days" where these sorts of things seemed to have gotten hammered out in a more civil & expeditious fashion (either that, or enough time has passed such that we've forgotten about them).
And there's a difference with BD in the history of different medias and their use with macs.
BD is the first media that you can't use for it's main usage with Mac and its OsX.
Think about if Apple had introduced cd-drives without possibility to playback audio-cd's or dvd-rive without possibility to playback dvd-movies.
Everybody would have been laughing at Apple.
True, but there also wasn't even any inkling of any reasonable alternative.
But, now they have excellent PR strategy and all what's happeming (or does not happen) can be thought as "being in the future already" or at least "not old fashioned".
People are comparing this to the situatuin when Apple ditched floppy from iMac.
But the situation is totally different, because Apple hasn't even adopted the current optical technology. This would be the same if Apple would have not offered optical drive and still ditched the floppy.
I'd agree that the current sitaution is different, but not necessarily how profound. For example, while the HD format war was being waged, it did make some sense to non-committaly stay on the sidelines.
The temptation is of course to try to second-guess the validity of historical decisions, years after the fact and probably with additional new information available.
For example, while we can point at ISPs' bandwidth services today as an impediment to streaming, what was the industry's ~2008 vintage outlook on where we "expected" ourselves to be by 2011?
Consider for example
this period report that I've happened to find
Caveat: I haven't read it in detail yet, but at a high level, suffice to say that it is suggesting a 40%-50%/year growth rate.
The big question today is ... did we actually achieve that growth? The implications are that if we didn't, then whatever stuff that was planned back in 2008 that depended on that capability growth can't have had succeeded. Or at least 'No Yet'.
And people who now praise the decision back then, probably wasn't tying to use those original iMacs. There was no way to save your data on anything you could carry with you. Everybody had to buy external floppy drives, zip drives or cd-r drives. And because there wasn't any real "de facto" choise of media, people who were dealing data from/to multiple sources/destinations, had to have many different drives. I really don't understand what was so nice and convenient in that?
True, it wasn't convenient, but we do need to look back and recognize that the problem of 'sneakernet' capability had been festering for years before the iMac appeared.
First, the 1.44 MB floppy (born 1986) only ever really became 'ubiquitous' because its technology replacement (the 2.88MB) utterly failed in the marketplace by 1990 and there weren't any other good & cheap alternatives. Yes, the marketplace demanded an alternative, which manifested itself with the Iomega ZIP drive (plus others) in 1994. But the problem was that a ZIP drive was still a $100 accessory even in 1998 when the iMac was released.
And sure, the first CD-R burners started to appear pre-iMac too, but a CD burner wasn't for everyone yet, since as of circa 1996, a good CD-R (with a 1GB scratch disk to minimize write fails) cost a cool ~$1000 ... and that was even before considering that good CD-R media was $100 per box of ten.
So by the time that the iMac finally came around, it was increasingly obvious that floppies sucked, but there weren't any equally cheap & good "physical media" alternatives. But the 56K modem that came on the first iMac could transfer the contents of a full 1.44 floppy in under 3 minutes.
FWIW, I can personally recall that before things finally settled down, I had actually used at least six (6) different format variants of the 3.5" floppy, and out of that whole bunch, I can only recall but one single example that was actually compatible with any more than one of the five other formats.
And that Guardian article tells pretty good where we stand right now: "Physical discs accounted for 96.5% of all sales in 2010."
Yes, it does. It will be interesting to watch if this changes for 2011.
Of course, if we look back at what our historical anticipation of where we probably expected ourselves to be by 2011, consider envisioning just how different this entire BD debate would be today if ~5GB could be transmitted anywhere in <3 minutes with an "as ubiquitous as a modem" technology...
In rough terms, it would basically mean that everyone would have at least an OC3 line right to their desk (and out to the world), which would mean that the slowest service that anyone would have would still be good enough to have a 50GB BD movie downloaded (or streamed) to them in <30 minutes.
Actually, at present time, saying no to physical media, is saying no to quality. This may of course change in the future, but there is no high quality streaming/downloading service available.
True, that's the pragmatic reality. However, the pedantic logic was correct in disagreeing with the pragmatic reality.
Comparing SaaS industry to selling $1 usb stick for $40 is not very simple.
Former means big and long investments and the latter only nice looking logo on the stick...
Agreed. My point on this comparison was in response to a complaint that selling a $1 USB stick for $40 was a horrible rip-off (sic): I pointed out that as horrible as it may be, it is still only a one-time sale, which is "peanuts" in comparison to the financial potential of SaaS (and other "services") which can be a rippy-money-suck for months-to-years-to-grave.
I find lack of BD just one of those many signs that Apple doesn't want to offer state-of-the-art anymore. Same thing with usb3, esata, 10G ethernet, non-crippled displayport, good expandability, reasonable desktop, sane memory design in MP, etc.
I agree that the "Technology for Technology's Sake" approach is gone. OTOH, I can also see that for some things it isn't particularly logical. For example, to be pushing for 10G Ethernet when most homes (and some businesses too) don't even yet have a 1G (Gigabit) Ethernet LAN deployed yet. Sure, some of us to have Gigabit LANs because we are early adopters and/or power users, but that doesn't mean that even the "Early Mainstream" are onboard yet for even this current generation (Gigabit), let alone the next one. But you're right: some of the decisions don't seem to make any technical sense whatsoever (agree in particular on the memory design on the MP).
What is surprising to me, that still someone thinks that OPTIONAL bd-drive in macintosh computers would somehow rise the cost of macintosh that does not have bd-drive.
They would have to add some code to kernel to have proper "secure path" for video and rewrite the dvd-player software to bd-player, but those are just pennies in the ocean.
This is a concern that I personally have, and because we don't necessarily know what Apple's real issues are with the "secure path" requirement, it isn't possible for us to judge.
For example, it could be as trivial technically as you suggest, but non-technically Apple doesn't want outsiders inspecting their "Trade Secret" code as part of some BR compliance requirement (
note: I'm speculating here - I don't know how they actually assure compliance). Or it could be something far different...we simply don't know. I'd prefer to have some real evidence of truely bad behavior before we call out the lynching party.
If you look at Apple's history and present about pricing BTO additions they usually charge a lot more than if you buy same things from regular stores. Considering that because they buy huge bulk orders, Apple gets these much cheaper than retail stores, so they make big profits on these. Just because those who can spend the money, enjoy the convenience. Why this would be any different with bd-drives?
Sure, but there's still going to be a lower limit on any item's manufacturing costs. Huge bulk orders certainly help by offering payback incentives to manufaturing technology efficiencies, but it still doesn't let one figuratively disobey the basic laws of physics. Let's not be too quick to compare BD to CD/DVD, since just the latter's red laser technology has easily a 25 year head start.
As the world is now - the only MEDIA available for hi def is Blu-Ray. A rip of a blu-ray is not media. We are talking physical media. Why is this so hard for you to understand?
If we step back and think about it, it really is the Theater Experience that is our Benchmark Reference for "Quality".
However, we've overlooked that in jumping to BD discussions that we've already made an assumption - - yes, a self-imposed artificial constraint - -namely that we are only considering a "Home" Theater alternative for which our own independent copy is a necessary component to have the capability.
But go ahead - if you have money to burn for a celluloid version of Lord of the Rings and prefer to spend it on that vs the blu-ray - more power to you....
Which is still assuming an on-demand convenience by having one's own independent copy. If we eliminate this assumption as a constraint, we can just simply go out to the local Theater for $20.
Of course, this "Go out to the Movies" method has constraints too ... but it is a legal distribution channel.
And now that we've parsed Apples from Oranges, we can hopefully put behind us some of these more ... critical ... paragraphs, and agree that there's at least two legal channels.
From there, we can also hopefully agree that one of these two channels do offer the choice on a form of on-demand (and at-home) media, commonly referred to as Blu-Ray.
Resume.
-hh
