Given that other manufacturers can get Blu-Ray plaback, including licensing in laptops for under 500 quid, I wouldn't have thought the licensing costs would affect the over 2K of a MacBook Pro...
Ultra portable laptops without CD or DVD drives have been around for well over a decade, but that doesn't stop the relevant companies offering normal laptops with drives as well.
The DVI port must support HDCP encryption (it is the same encryption that HDMI uses). All current graphic chips support it, as do all of the non-Intel graphic chipsets Apple have used for their Intel machines (the newer HD chipsets from Intel do support HDCP over DVI, but Apple don't have any in their range, they are all nVidia or ATi, both of which have support HDCP since 2005 in their chips.
But a server is something else, that isn't expected to be an end-user machine, it will sit in a cupboard or computer room, dishing up files or web pages, it isn't supposed to be a consumption device.
I'm in two minds. On the one hand, I like having the DVDs/BDs, but my office is full, I have another 400 in the lounge and another 100 or so in the hall... So I would really like having an electronic library, but the compression quality is usually much higher, and the resulting image and audio quality isn't as good - especially for downloaded, they want to minimise the bandwidth as much as possible, even if image quality suffers a bit.
I agree totally. It doesn't need to be standard, but it should be an option for those that want/need it.
