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Jobs says no to Blu-ray on Macs… again 
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Steve Jobs has once again spoken candidly about his disdain for Blu-ray, explaining to a MacRumors reader in an email that the hi-def discs will be "beaten by internet downloadable formats".

Jobs, who seems to be responding to all emails at the moment including ones that begin with 'Dear respected one', showed he still has a bone to pick with Blu-ray, by refusing to believe the format was worthy of inclusion in Apple's latest Mac Mini range.

In the email, he noted: "Bluray [sic] is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD – like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats."

Okay, so it's not quite as vitriolic as his 'bag of hurt' rant, but it seems he is still not convinced by Blu-ray.

All about convenience

After the MacRumors' reader replied saying that this may be true for the long term but not medium term, Jobs came back with: "No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off.

"And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.

"I think you may be wrong - we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over."

Does Jobs know something we don't know? Has he really got an Blu-ray killer stuffed in his polo neck somewhere?

We're not convinced that iTunes rentals will kill off Blu-rays just yet.


Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/video/blu ... z0sSRVf0LW

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

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Thu Jul 01, 2010 6:46 pm
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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!


Thu Jul 01, 2010 7:29 pm
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forquare1 wrote:
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?

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Thu Jul 01, 2010 7:55 pm
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forquare1 wrote:
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!

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


Thu Jul 01, 2010 8:00 pm
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jonbwfc wrote:
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.


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


Thu Jul 01, 2010 8:04 pm
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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...

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Thu Jul 01, 2010 9:35 pm
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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.

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Thu Jul 01, 2010 10:08 pm
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JJW009 wrote:
More people watch 720p from the bay of parrots than buy "blurays".

That I can believe.

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Thu Jul 01, 2010 10:20 pm
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l3v1ck wrote:
Jobs isn't right.

Oh yes he is.
l3v1ck wrote:
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.

I didn't.
l3v1ck wrote:
Maybe he should try asking what his customers want rather than telling them what they want.

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.

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Fri Jul 02, 2010 12:36 am
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l3v1ck wrote:
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.


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.


Fri Jul 02, 2010 12:43 am
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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.

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Fri Jul 02, 2010 5:10 pm
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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.

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Sat Jul 03, 2010 5:52 pm
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davrosG5 wrote:
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?

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Sat Jul 03, 2010 6:22 pm
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Amnesia10 wrote:
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


Sat Jul 03, 2010 7:01 pm
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I have Toast Titanium but had not noticed this. :oops:

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Sat Jul 03, 2010 8:16 pm
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