I guess what I don't understand about BluRay is that even if our laptops had them, watching BluRay on the laptop's screen, or an external monitor would still look like crap/regular DVD, would it not?
Admittedly I haven't downloaded anything HD from Apple but I have a feeling that on my ACD it wouldn't look any different at all from regular non-HD content...correct me if I'm wrong.
I watch Blu Rays on my home theater. But if I'm traveling, I can't exactly take a 42" LCD and Blu Ray player on the plane with me, it would be nice to bring a few Blu Rays along and watch them on my laptop, even if it's 2 channel audio and not on an HD screen. I shouldn't have to buy the same movie twice.
who needs blueray on a notebook anyway?
watching movies on my 13" macbook is a pain in the ass
The old "Since I won't use it, that must mean that no one else will use it" line. Same was said about copy/paste and MMS on the iPhone.
Why would anyone watch a movie on their iMac? There are two usage scenarios for watching HD movies:
1. At home on your HDTV
2. On your laptop while traveling. More likely the more portable ones (13" and 15"), which are not 1080p anyway. You are not going to bust out your 17" MBP on a plane, especially if you sit in economy.
Who watches a movie at home at their desktop?
I have a Blu Ray drive in my Mac Pro. It's hooked up to a Dell U2410 (1920x1200, so HD) display. I've watched Blu Rays in Windows 7 boot camp before, and the quality is amazing. I prefer watching on my 1080p 42" LCD with a surround system, but if I didn't have that TV, I would certainly watch Blu Rays on my monitor. Blu Ray on a monitor still beats the crap out of DVD on an old SD CRT TV.
The only thing 720p does for iTunes movies is make the compression artifacts more clearer. iTunes "HD" is garbage.
1. More battery life on laptops.
If I want to run down my battery in 30 minutes, that's my choice. But maybe I'm on a plane with a power port and don't have to worry about a battery
2. Keep all your movies conveniently on your hard drive.
You might be on to something if we were arguing for LaserDisc support on Macs, but Blu Rays are small enough to carry around
3. No need to carry around physical discs.
See point above
4. No need to go to the store or plan in advance to watch a movie.
Netflix. I haven't been to a video rental store in years
5. If you get an SSD and remove disc drive, no moving parts in your laptop. Ideally, any portable device should have no moving parts.
Laptops have had moving parts in them for years, it's not a big deal
You need 5Mb/s to stream great quality 720p, which is not out of most people's reach. If you only have 2.5Mb/s, you can still download a 90 minute movie in 3 hours, or start watching it after an hour and a half.
In an hour and a half, I can go to Blockbuster, come back and be finished with half the movie. Give me another hour and I can be back at Blockbuster returning it.
And a Blu Ray has a bit rate of somewhere between 30 and 50mbps variable, depending on what's going on in the scene. The fact that Blu Ray requires 6-10 times the bandwidth of iTunes should tell you how much better Blu Ray is.
Yes, blu-ray still delivers the best home theater experience but if you wanted the best home theater experience, you wouldn't be watching on a computer anyway.
I don't want the best home theater experience, I want to be able to watch my movie collection on the go without having to buy it again or waste time and space ripping it, or risk getting busted by the MPAA on a torrent tracker.
well we play it on my PB G4 and play it through composite on my GF's 16" CRT tube TV with mono speaker. In that case there is no difference between Blue Ray and iTunes HD or anything else.......
Are you joking, or are you seriously trying to insist that there's no difference between iTunes and Blu Ray because you couldn't tell a difference when you hooked up a Blu Ray player via composite to a 16" CRT?