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Steve Jobs Suggests Blu-ray Not Coming to Mac Anytime Soon
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Most 15" and bigger laptops have screens with higher resolution than the pathetic 1440x900 Apple offers. Usually 1680x1050, which is close enough to 1080p.
Even on Apple's pathetically low-resolution displays, you get a better image downscaling 1920x1080 to 1440x900 than you get upscaling 720x480 to 1440x900.
And I'd like to have a word with you about Apple's 2560x1600 30" cinema display... Great for 320x240 youtube videos, right?
And finally, since so many of you are completely ignorant about HTPC, it stands for HOME THEATER PC, wherein a person attaches their computer to their big screen TV and audio receiver. Considering big screen TVs bottom out higher than Apple's biggest cinema display, yes, we DO have BIG MONITORS to enjoy those movies.
I've had a few DVDs fail, usually dual-layer discs where the glue between layers has broken down. But in each case the producer has replaced the disc for free.
Uh, you seem to keep insulting the screen resolution of 1440x900. I don't recall seeing anything higher on any competitors when I purchased my 15" MBP two years ago.
Last year, Apple added the option to get a "high res" screen of 1680x1050 for the 15" MBP (and made 1920x1200 standard on the 17"). I've recently heard of Sony having a 1080p resolution on a 15" laptop.
Calling the 1440x900 resolution "pathetic" when compared with 1680x1050 is kind of silly. It's just a 36% increase in pixels. Yeah, it's nice... but it's nothing like Apple's Retina display for the iPhone, which had a 100% increase.
Apple has actually kept up with the competition as far as I'm aware. Apple was, actually, the first company I heard of offering a 1680x1050 15" laptop.
As for your "big screen TVs"... Keep in mind that they only have a "pathetic" resolution of 1920x1080. Meanwhile, the 27" iMac has a resolution of 2560x1440. (and the 30" ACD has a resolution of 2560x1600)
So yeah, Macs could clearly benefit from HD video from Blu-ray.
Can I suggest an experiment?
Compare a BluRay movie on a Vaio with a 720p movie on a MacBook Pro screen.
And try to work out why the MacBook is by far the more enjoyable experience.
The quality of an image matters a lot more than the quantity of pixels.
C.
That is pretty easy. If you find the MacBook is the most enjoyable experience, you're probably stuck in the reality distortion field.
Do not panic, there is still hope for you, just take down that full size Steve poster from your room's wall and blow out the candles you lit up under it. Stay away from tech for about 72 hours afterwards and you should be cured.
(Macbook screens, especially the LED based ones, are still very much awful...).
Last April btw. Not last year.
That reality distortion field is too powerful. It seems to have an incredibly negative effect on the VAIO display panel. I bought one last year, and it is convinced me that it is literally the worst screen on a modern computer I have ever seen.
Some screens have such a narrow viewing angle, that two people can't watch at the same time.
The VAIO has such a narrow viewing angle that ONE person can't watch at the same time. Wherever the observer sits, parts of the screen are faded and inverted. Or washed out and full of light bleed.
This crazy reality distortion field has me so confused that I think that a bright crisp display is preferable to a muddy washed out panel at a fractionally higher resolution.
See how the RDF makes dark green on the Vaio turn light blue.
It does not stop there!
My powerful man-love for Steve Jobs has me so muddled that I am starting to think that a 5 megapixel sensor with excellent low noise performance is superior to an 8 megapixel sensor with abysmal low-light performance.
How crazy is that?
C.
Either way, the person I was replying to seemed to insinuate that Apple didn't have such a resolution. I'd still never heard of any other 15" laptop having as high a screen resolution until after Apple did it. (that doesn't mean they didn't... just that it wasn't widely publicized or widely available)
Most of those cheap Windows laptops on the market now are probably lucky if they have 1440x900.
I just checked, actually...
A 15.6" Dell (that's currently $600 on Walmart.com... was $700) only has 1366x768 (that sounds like one of those "720p" resolutions).
I was merely pointing out that Macs aren't behind on the curve in terms of displays. Apple hasn't been keeping up with their own external displays... but those never were good bargains anyway. (and they'd probably be glossy now anyway...)
And, in any event... the quality of screens being used does have a visible effect. It's entirely possible that some Sony VAIO laptops have a lower quality screen... (especially their 1080p stuff) They may not have as good viewing angles or color accuracy as the screens Apple uses.
I mean, let's just look at past Sony VAIO issues... like the inability to use the original "XP Mode" in Windows 7. (I think Microsoft has since removed the requirement to have hardware virtualization.) Sony probably got cheaper processors because they had the hardware virtualization disabled. Apple laptops? I had no problem running XP Mode on my late-2008 MBP.
You get what you pay for.
This is the paradox with this vod-ip.
If it's made too attractive, it will hose the internet. Let's hope that old people still connects their tv's to the cable for a long time instead of ethernet.
Aren't "caps" usually just throttling? I've read lot of news about ISP's "prioritizing" rates after certain amount is reached. At least in EU, ISPs have hard time trying to introduce hard caps even with pirating, since internet is being seen as "civil right" and consumer rights are good. Eg. if ISP doesn't provide easy way for consumer to monitor the amount of traffic, there can be no immediate actions when caps are reached.
But ISPs are getting their traffic based monitoring and charging systems working and they will be using them as the difference in consumers usage widens. Already it's like 1% of customers are using 99% of bandwidth. When it's 0.1% using 99.9% and their usage is 1000 times more than now, ISPs have to act. Otherwise average user's cost would be way too high for consumer to accept.
Then comes the issue what is fair cap/throttle for consumers?
Can you "save" your bandwidth to have it more in peak hours?
Then the system would be based on amount of traffic and isn't the situation this right now?
How could you cap the bandwidth by only looking present time usage?
Wouldn't that be same cap for everybody regardless of your usage and so pretty unfair? Wild wild west?
Isn't "download on-going for more than 1 minute at X bps" throttling more based on traffic than bandwith (time*bps)?
About QoS: usually ISPs offer 3 kind of pipes: dedicated (defined endpoints), QoS (X bps, x% of time) and bulk. From what I've heard there's at least 10x price difference from one to another. If ISP want's to give consumer a nice ip-vod experience from outside of IPS's own network, the need for QoS quality bandwidth is increasing and therefore costs for ISP for same amount of bandwidth are also increasing.
Of course ISPs that are also cable operators try not to give benefit for some other content providers. But they know they are fighting against windmills. But instead giving cheap pipe to Apple, they develop their own vod system.
In near future ISPs don't have their own vod service still working, so they might not make Apple hard time delivering iTunes movies.
So for Apple to get iTunes movies successful, they need to make very good deals with ISPs.
In the medium time scale, ISPs try to compete with iTunes movies and this will be hard time for Apple if they don't became ISP themselves.
For long time scale, pipes are getting so fast, that bandwidth isn't an issue any more.
IIRC, most problems when optical storage was new in mainstream were with corrosive inks on label side.
I guess that single layer gold dvd-r burned with slowest speed is the most reliable today. I'm not sure which is more problematic: cd's have data very near of label side or dvd's having 2 layers that can separate. But anyway, it's one the most convenient to freshen the archive, since the physical sizes of different optical storage generations are the same.
15 years from now, you can take that 1000 disc archive, have couple of normal basic computers, choose the most reliable optical media at that time and freshen your archive in a week.
Usually this is much more complicated with other media. In 15 years it might be hard to find even IDE-controllers, like now is not easy to copy microchannel hdd to newer one. Or dd floppy in mac format.
Nice logic: macs don't need bd, because your Vaio has bad picture quality!
How crazy is that?
Does iTunes movie look as bad on your Vaio, than it does on high quality displays?
How about 17" mbp with bd?
Would that make good experience?
Or any other laptop with high quality display?
Or any laptop that you plug in to your Kuro at home or any other big high quality display anywhere in the world?
If optical disc would really be dead, there wouldn't be optical drives in macs. Since they have them, they are just outdated.
So people could as well just buy used macs.
I won't buy a new mac before it has bd.
I use the saved money to triple play bd movies and higher quality displays than macs have.
it really depends on your ISP. over here on my ISP i get 50GB at full speed, no "peak" hours. after that 50GB i get capped back to 64kbps (****** dial up
). there are no actual caps on the downloads - though dial up is a pretty big physical limitation haha.other ISPs offer on peak and off peak, which is an ok idea - i would prefer if the ISPs offered say, 10GB on peak then fully unlimited off peak! i wouldnt care then, but with the throttling its pathetic.
other ISPs offer ACTUAL limits, so if you go over you start paying for every MB/GB.
I use a plug-in in FireFox, tells me exactly what I've used and how much I have left per day to stay under that limit and it's always there on my web browser window.
Apart from that I can for to my ISP and see what I've used but since the plug-in I hardly go their anymore.
http://netusage.iau5.com/
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All of the big laptop manufacturers have offered 1920x1200 on 15.4" displays for years. Not sure where you looked. I'm not trying to be argumentative (there's enough of that around here already), but simply stating fact. It was simply a drop down choice for each system I've ordered. The HP I bought in 2005 was 1920x1200. The Dell and Thinkpad models I was considering at the time were also available in the same resolution (I had them all configured through the online ordering systems for comparison purposes).
Are you kidding me? Did you even look at any competitors? The 1440x900 display is the exception, used mostly by the bottom feeders, most of the upper competition had/has 1680x1050 displays. I bought two 15" Thinkpads at the same time I bought my Uni MBP and they both had 1680x1050 as the base option, I think 1920x1200 was available. Heck I once had a 15" Thinkpad that had a 1600x1200 screen, about 6 years ago.
Ever wonder why?
So you keep your displays at 640x480 and watch VCDs, then?
haha oh god.
hmm. interesting. they better hurry up. the writes better be good!
Or maybe this is first:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
or this:
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3
See Steve the optical disc in some form will be with us for a long time to come!
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