Why would i want to wait for BR blank media to fall to reasonable prices? By then we'll have flash cards storing more in less space and costing less.

Flash memories will never match optical discs. After BD there will be holographic 500GB+ discs. And optical discs last many more years and data stored on them can't be deleted/corrupted by any electromagnetic sources.

"And optical discs last many more years and data stored on them can't be deleted/corrupted by any electromagnetic sources."

Of course not... they only suffer bit rot.

You make the Blu-Ray an option Steve, if the customer wants the burden of the extra cost they they will pay for it. As for the licensing burden, this isn't a factor for the customer so don't try and pass it off as one.

Its not just about movies. When the price of blanks come down there is a lot of data that can be stored as well. 25-50gb on a disk is pretty darn good if the media was just come down in price.

I dont think hes bashing blu-ray in any way shape or form, hes just saying theres alot of headache with the licensing process. Period. Thats it. Oh please you Microsoft kids need to stop taking MS d*ck because you are all just bashing Blu-Ray because it beat out HD-DVD.

You are all hypocrites. You were all for large optical media when HD-DVD was around, and then since they lost, now you, like M$, preach "oh its irrelevant, downloads are the future." Please, who has hard drive space for 1GB+ television shows and movies without using a large backup media (like blu-ray or external discs) to keep making space with.

Even more important than that, look up "US Bandwidth crisis" and you tell me with a straight face, that downloads are ready to take over. It's simply not so and for the next 10 years or so when HD downloads are practical blu will be our mainstay.

Lastly, look what people said about cassettes. Oh we dont need cassettes, we got 8 track, its not going anywhere. Then oh we dont need cd's, cassette tapes are good enough. Then it was, what do we need DVD's for? we got cd's and vhs! and now its why BluRay, we have dvd's. Well the answer is simple, like all the others, they make way for more capacity and higher quality. Simple as that, and if you cant wrap your head around that, you dont know anything about tech.

http://tinyurl.com/69hl39

Newflash, not liking Blu-Ray doesn't automatically mean the person liked HD-DVD.

Lastly, look what people said about cassettes. Oh we dont need cassettes, we got 8 track, its not going anywhere. Then oh we dont need cd's, cassette tapes are good enough.

Now that's just BS; it you are going to make stuff up don't make it completely ridiculous.

It is amazing how Blu-ray has almost vanished off the face of the earth at this point. Go into any store you like that sells the players...no one is talking about them. More importantly, no one is buying them. As I said over a year ago on this same subject, the single worst thing that could have happened to the Blu-ray market was the death of the HD DVD format. As predicted, there is now no interest or excitement whatsoever in the Blu-ray space. Prices are still too high and customers just don't see the benefit to justify those prices.

The customers aren't buying and the product isn't moving off the she. With upconverting DVD players continuing to improve quality, add features (USB thumb drive ports for MP3 file playback) while lowering prices, Blu-ray looks to be dead in the water more and more every day.

Maybe that's what happens in your small town, the rest of the world is way different.

Ya what rock do you live under? I went to bestbuy yesterday and now a whole isle that would previously be dvd/vhs is now all blu-ray. I go into blockbuster, they've started a blu-ray wall, thats almost as large as the entire new/used for purchase section. I went to Futureshop as well, every tv was hooked up to Blu-ray to display the quality of the picture. Amazon.com has blu-ray sales (like buy one get one, buy one get one 50%, etc) nearly bi-weekly. So I dont know what your talking about....

Simply because various outlets have numerous players and media in stock and taking up shelf/wall space doesn't mean the products are moving, which is exactly what MikeTechno said... it simply isn't selling, and he would know better than most on that subject.

That's absolutely not true. Just look at Amazon.com sales rank for Blu-Ray releases. And new releases don't last even a week in shops because they always sell all the copies they get.

Blu-Ray is certainly a bag of something...

In the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war, Microsoft and others screamed this at the top of their lungs.

Even the 'end user' restrictions in Blu-Ray were a major concern of Microsoft's as the licensing requires the content to remain on the media.

Let alone the poor UI and programming model for the menu/interface system that still isn't 100% finished.

Where was Jobs when the war was going on? Why is he now b****ing about Blu-Ray when he could have joined to shove Sony in the drain over the crap they were shoving at users, that is Blu-Ray.

If people want to understand what Sony is all about, just look at the price of Blu-Ray and how it increased when HD-DVD was taken off the market.

Or heck, even look at any Sony device in your living room, they give you a multi-function remote, but it will ONLY work for other Sony devices, unlike being a 'universal' remote like every other MFR provides.

Sony likes to control their users and create fake lock-in far more than people stop to realize.

What makes me laugh about BR is the fact that alot of POS3 owners are playing downloaded mkv HD content on their POS3's anyway. BloRay as a disc format is consigned to just being a mass storage media. Just buy a media tank for a lot less than a POS3 and an x360 added together still for less than the price of a POS3 together!!

MKV encodes you find for free on the 'net are low bitrate/low quality contents.
Do you really want to compare those to H.264 35Mbps 50GB Blu-Ray DL Discs ?

Nope. Do you want to compare the price?

Entry level only lowered in the US, in the UK the entry level is now more expensive!

Thank you Steve..... you are the so smart!
I wonder why you only have 8% market share?
maybe Apple really stinks!

Thank you Steve. You've always made the right decisions down thru the years in guiding Apple and looking out for the best interest of your Mac users. You're the greatest CEO ever.

Blu-ray is overhyped and far from a necessity right now.

Yup, Steve knows all!

Like his braindead resistance to the concept of I/O slots in the MacII line that got him tossed from Apple the FIRST time.

So isn't it ironic that ole' Steve supported Blu-Ray so early on!

Remember, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Um your pov is very short sighted, the reality is far more complex. I prefer to think of him a necessary evil.

btw can you explain how the puck mouse was in the best interests of Mac users(or was it made during the time he got fired)?

"overhyped" ?
Not necessary, what ? Are you kidding?
The problem here is that those going around on forums writing these things would just want everything for free and never buy original copies of anything, that's the problem.
If you think that a pirated re-encode of anything is like the original you don't have a clue. It will take at least another year before 1:1 Blu-Ray 50GB DL copies could be cheap enough to create anyway, and even when that happens like it happened with DVDs before people like you will keep complaining simply because even if it was just at a cost of 1 cent then it would still be too much for them.

That's why you put it on the hard drive. No need for Blu-ray. No need to burn it, so it would be free and no complaints.

Steve Jobs once again demonstrates to be a greedy monopolistic wannabe rich guy that tries to imitate his friend/foe Bill Gates by showing that he can be even worse.
I wouldn't be surprised if he would even decide to push the dead HD-DVD standard with its Apple brand just to look different and trying to make people believe that the dead format is the way to go, although people chose otherwise.

Yet another rant with no substance or an ounce of fact. Typical Winblows user, misguided, ill-informed and http://img.photobucket.c...1/head_up_your_ass2.jpg

This is indeed one wacko post. Apple was an early Blu-Ray proponent.

Get a clue.

and your comment is not that better. winblows user? common man. you're acting like what os you use is synonymous with what religion you choose.

"although corporations and studios chose otherwise."

Clarified that for you.

Consumers didn't choose squat...

Apple HATES to pay for Licensing but LOVES to collect Licensing fee's.

Does anyone still us Disc's anymore??

Yup, that's why they refuse to release their most substantial products for licensing despite substantial demand.

And funny, the PC press only whined about the PowerBook/MacBook for dropping the floppy and listed it as a big negative in their ratings for HOW MANY years?

And who uses disks? Its a bit premature to write non-volatile hard copies off yet...unless you are one of the P2P MP3 wackos - in which case...who cares? ;-)

Cute comment, but do a bit more research first, fanboy.

Could someone come along and introduce another HD format? Could Apple see that one format with complex licensing be an oppty? Maybe an open source HD format??

I doubt I will ever buy BR.

http://afewtips.com

Another HD format ? Why? Open-source what? The open-source myth, of course, that's a fashionable word to use... Is Apple so poor that Steve Jobs couldn't afford paying the BDA the needed fees ? Pathetic, that's just pathetic, indeed.

You don't want to buy Blu-Ray ? Then that's bad for you. Do as you please, don't enjoy high bitrate HDTV movies and a pretty large storage format.

why would we want another hd war?

That would be fun. I miss the Blu-bloods.

Yup, just another idiot who touts specs and then proposes to watch 1080p format sources on a 15 or 17 inch screen.

Hey genius, here's some homework for you when you finish your coloring book assignment - find out if the Mac 15 and 17 inch screeens are even capable of displaying the full 1080p source?

Oh...what?...huh?

What a Bozo.

Yeah, sure.. let's go back to CGA/EGA 320x240 displays,uh? Who needs and higher resolution?
Some Mac systems don't make the whole market nor the whole world.

"During a Q&A session following Apple's special MacBook event on Tuesday, company CEO and industry magnate Steve Jobs said Apple was holding off on incorporating Blu-ray because licensing the technology is "a bag of hurt."

O M G he said something smart for once! :P

Notebooks do not need Blu-Ray or HD-DVD (when it was around), HD movies are for real TV's and dedicated home theaters.

Besides, I don't think BD is going to make it anyways. That didn't stop me from picking up the new Indiana Jones today.

And if you have said "real TV" and thus a movie collection containing Blu-Ray movies what if you would like to watch said movie while you are on travel? I suppose you could buy the DVD version of all your Blu-ray movies but it sure would be nice to be able to just play the Blu-Ray movie on your laptop even though you won't be able to get the full experience with it's limited audio/video capabilities. You may also be somewhere at some point (hotel, friends house, etc.) where there is a decent HDTV but no Blu-ray player and so using the laptop as a Blu-ray player could come in handy.
Plus from a strictly data since Blu-ray Data discs hold A LOT more data then a DVD so if you need to carry a lot of data you could do so on fewer discs.

or you could get a 1tb drive and enclosure for around the same price as a BD drive if not cheeper.

This is one of the reasons I liked HD-DVD. They had the dual format discs so taking it on the plane for my portable DVD wasn't a problem.

Not every movie came in dual format. More BD's are coming with digital copies of the movies however.

I agree... why then must sony equip all Viaos with a bloray drive? So they can stack the numbers of sales.

The original premise for BR in a computer was its capacity for non-volatile storage and backup...

Remember the fanboys incessant - but the capacity is greater than HD-DVD argument?????????

NOT simply for your perceived notion of watching a 1080p source in a 15 or 17 inch monitor!

The real death of BR is due to the enterprise IT world totally ignoring it. That market alone would have provided significant economies of scale which have severely hurt Sony and its attempt to bring the consumer price down to a reasonable level.

BD won't make it ? What a nonsense.
Blu-Ray discs are selling like hotcakes nowadays. Prices are falling down a lot.
You can buy 20 TDK or Sony BD-R 25GB discs from Japanese sellers for $110-$130. That's really cheap considering that a single disc is like 6 DVD-R ones and DVD-R DL discs are quite expensive.
Blu-Ray burners prices are falling down as well and they are absolutely cheap, now selling at the same price DVD ones were up to just 3-4 years ago.

And the 1TB HDU would fail miserabily in a few months. Nowadays even Seagate drives have an higher than ever before fault rate thanks to their new factory being all placed in China lacking proper quality controls.

Optical media doesn't get destroyed by magnetic or electromagnetic impulses, it's less prone to heat problems and handling it with care to prevent scratches would allow a disc to last for 10-30 years or more. I own very old CD-Rs from the '90s still fully working with no scratches.

Well, you got one thing right:

What nonsense. Indeed.

Prices falling alot?
A movie can still cost me over 30 bucks.
Freakin ripoff.

hrmm I'll remember to investigate that next time i am in the market for new large drives. thx

that was cool, I hope that the digital copy thing works out. Though BD needs a much lower price point per movie. I think that would really clench it. (i assume players will continue to drop in price)

I think 2k10 is when BD will either shine or start being replaced by like internet stream boxes.

$24.95:
http://www.amazon.com/gp...1&pf_rd_i=193640011

Even as low as $17.95:

http://www.amazon.com/b/...1&pf_rd_i=193640011

Walmart has DVD's for $1.

"And the 1TB HDU would fail miserabily in a few months."

Some, maybe but not all. My 80mb (megabyte) hard drive in my Pentium(1) with 100MHz with Windows 95 still works from the late 90's (can't remember exact year I got it).

"Selling like hotcakes"??

Pass it around, buddy. That must be some good s***.

Toolie, if you go on like this you are going to end up in a leftist hippie kibbutz in no time...

Blu-Ray discs are selling like hotcakes nowadays.

So are Laserdiscs. Retailers can't keep them in stock.

Tell me about it... I can't find them anywhere! ;)

True. I've still got 1.2GB Seagate drives from '97 that have no issues whatsoever... but I wouldn't want to use them these days.

I'm glad SOMEONE had the balls to state the obvious.

What was the price of the cheapest MacBook Pro prior to this announcement?

$1999

Ouch!

oohh, but it's so nice it's worth temporarily going into debt for. Besides, I have friends who are still content with the macbook they bought 6 years ago - so it's like 2 laptops for the price of one. And the new macBookPro's are even sweeter - you should go to apple's site and check out how they are put together. This is definitely the State-Of-The-Art.

Apple's New 13" MacBook, The most popular notebook from Apple, the 13" MacBook -- which typically sells for $1,099 -- got a price reduction to $999.

From the next Apple article on BN.

$100 drop. Nothing spectacular.

Pro.

Never mind though. Still about £200 off for students :)

Pretty poor state then. This same tech has been used for years inloads of other applications. So what, they carve it out of one peice of Aluminum... It's nice but I would not call that state of the art.

Steve Job does something right. Wow.

Btw people didn't choose blur-ray. The hd-dvd home units were doing better than blu-ray before sony payed the major labels to go exclusive (aka the real reason they won the war). The consumers didn't decide this one.

www.itp.net/index.php?op...w=article&id=496256

arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070418-dedicated-hd-dvd-players-outsell-blu-ray.

Stand alone units. This does not count all the blu-rays forced on ps3 owners.

Actually it was Microsoft w/Toshiba that paid a lot of bucks to Paramount to go HD-DVD exclusive and even that didn't work because Blu-Ray discs were selling more than HD-DVD ones.

Come again.. search Sony and what they paid Fox. There was a plan for Fox and Warners to jump the bloray ship and go exclusive HD. They paid more than MS did to Paramount. Speculation is Microsoft knew that the HD disk format was a lost cause and only did this to buy time for streaming HD.