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I'm not even convinced BRs will 'take off' in the next few years, never mind 720p downloads and streaming

At the moment, I have no need for a Blu-Ray drive as I have no Blu-Ray disks...
If my Mac Pro had come with Blu-Ray drives I would have had to fork out more than I did, and to not use them!

I only have my iMacs which have screens capable of viewing them. I still do not have a BD player or PS3 so why bother?

BR writers are actually now, if not cheap, then at least not expensive. Given the price of HDD space these days, a BR writer + BR ripping software + a 1TB external hard drive to store them on would actually cost you less than the BR writer itself would have about six months ago. That will of course improve - in six months you'll be able to get a BR writer plus a 2TB drive for the cost of the writer now.

TBH if you want to view high def BR movies on your mac, there's pretty much nothing stopping you as it is - it simply a case of reasonable expenditure (say around £200) and a flexible attitude to commercial IP protection. There's no reason to wait for Steve to 'bless' the technology for you.

Jon

Indeed. That said, I'm still not really interested...

More people watch 720p from the bay of parrots than buy "blurays".

Jobs is right.

I can't even watch BR discs if I buy a BR player because the stupid HDCP DRM means I can't watch it on my HD TV. I can obviously play the rips no problem, because obviously the DRM was broken before it was even released...

Jobs isn't right.
I recently bought a laptop and I wad sure it had a full HD and Blu Ray drive so I could watch top quality films.
People want it, he's just being an arse about it. Maybe he should try asking what his customers want rather than telling them what they want.

That I can believe.

Oh yes he is.

I didn't.

They want what he tells them they want, except for a very loud minority who complain all the time regardless of any facts and are financially insignificant.

Generally people don't want it...At least not in my experience. In most homes (OK, students and their families), they have a DVD player and a TV. They don't have a Blu-Ray player on their main TV, but they may have a PS3 in the bedroom which plays them...

The majority of shelves in HMV and other such places still cater for the DVD audience, not the Blu-Ray audience. I can well imagine a time where downloads outweigh physical media, and I think video will go that way before Blu-Ray comes in big time.

Even the people who do the Macworld podcast want blu-ray.

At the end of the day, unless you have an apple tv, you can't get HD movies from iTunes, so blu-ray is the only other legal way.

I can see several reasons Jobs doesn't want Blu-ray on the Mac.

First, his company has a rival delivery system to peddle (iTunes/Apple TV). Why on Earth would he let BR in to spoil all the fun, not mention the revenue stream that HD via iTunes represents.

Second, licensing. AFAIK it isn't free to include BR functionality. There are licensing fees to be paid (to Sony?) in order to be able to decode and send the HD picture from the disc to the display of your choice via either HDMI, Display Port or compatible DVI interface (if there is such a thing). Each interface also has its own copy protection scheme built in which adds another layer of stuff.

I also can't help but thinking that Mr. Jobs is thinking that physical media, at least as far as DVD size media is concerned is on its way out. There are already a couple of Macs (and the Apple TV for that matter) that have no internal drive at all (the MacBook Air and the MacMIni server). Niche products in the range I grant you but it does demonstrate that we are slowly approaching a situation where you maybe only need one physical DVD drive for several machines for software installation, if at all.

Personally, I can't say I agree with Jobs on this one. At the very least, BR support should be in OS X for those that do want to use it for whatever reason. Given the Macs traditional role in the Creative industries it seems decidedly odd that a major format can't be natively written to by Apples production apps like Final Cut without having the purchase additional software to make it work properly. A BR writer should be a BTO option on the Mac Pro at the very least and a reader with DVD-R/RW support an option for the iMac and MacBook/Pro ranges. HD on a 27" screen is, after all rather watchable.

For the media industry that mainly use macs might actually benefit from BD capability, though as you say Mac Pros might be the best market. I think it also would be very expensive to upgrade the OS to cover all the DRM issues for a few users, maybe that is the real reason?

Pretty much all the professional blu-ray authoring packages you could buy on the Mac (if you had several grand handy) include the necessary code to play back encoded footage as a matter of necessity. It just doesn't exist in the consumer level yet I think - I could be wrong but I don't think Toast Titanium (the only 3rd party consumer level DVD/BR etc authoring product on the Mac worth talking about) does.

Jon

I have Toast Titanium but had not noticed this.