Seriously, knock it off. I am not, nor have I ever been a "Kool aid" drinker (and that is most definitely calling people blind followers, as you have just admitted- therefore, an insult.). More often than not, I have been against what Apple has done in the past, like doing away with matte screens and firewire. It IS an insult, as you try to paint me as some blind follower of Steve Jobs. I can assure you, I am most definitely not. I see the need here for Blu-ray support, you have an argument there, but I see absolutely no need for Apple to include Blu-ray drives in all of their machines.
When you blindly repeat Steve's bullet points against the technology, you have a blind loyalty yes. It's not an insult, it's a fact. Again, lay down the coffee and chill.
As for Blu-ray, it's not so much the drives that are important, as people have pointed out, you can buy them yourself and plug them into your Mac easily.
It's the software support. DVD Player needs to be able to read and playback Blu-ray movies (and a name change). That is something for now that only Apple can do.
The only true HD is FULL 1080p resolution.
1080p is one thing, Blu-ray is another. You have to factor in compression too. You have have 2 1080p movies and one will look like complete crap and the other will have close to perfect quality.
The difference is in the compression settings you use in the encoder. People claiming that H.264 1080p streams off the net will look anything like Blu-ray are plain ignorant. 45 mbps bit rates for video is not unheard of for Blu-ray. Sustain that over your 6 mbps DSL pipe, we aren't even talking about the audio yet.
Seriously, the "cloud" (why try to rename the Internet ?) isn't there yet. It's not going to be there for a long while. Something as easy as digital music distribution, with 5 MB files, isn't quite there yet either. Even with high VBR or 320 kbps CBR which make mp3 files as close to CDs as you'll get, CDs still offer better quality. A frickin 25 year old technology. And people still buy more CDs than they do downloads because of the tangible good for your money.
Working at my student job in the 90s, the cable company, they presented us a graph. 50% of the population doesn't care. They are set in their ways and just want what they know. 30% will wait a few years and adopt. 15% adopt new stuff after a year or so. 5% are bleeding edge and wait in line for the latest crap, no matter how good or bad it is. This was research done by the marketing dept.
Once you go over the 50% penetration line, you've just burst into the population that doesn't care. You're mainstream and here to stay. Blu-ray is now around 37% penetration, well into the people who wait a few years and then adopt. It's going to be mainstream in the next few years as DVD players get phased out. The DVD backward compatibility is going to ensure that.
Yes. Apple TV says it uses component cables (RCA) and my TV has several of those inputs.
Of course your 75% is way off, but that's expected of cherry picked anecdotal evidence. HDTV penetration rates are much higher than that. Blu-ray is now at 37%, HDTV is probably around 50% now (46% at the start of the year).
I have one of those Sony Wega, 27" big ass tubes. Of course, I also have a HDTV. It has 2 inputs for Component, which is not the same as composite (both use RCA connectors). Don't mix them up, they're not the same.
