That's what I had assumed, now that mobile i5 and i7 chips are hitting the market.

I hope that is the case.

As to Blu-Ray, meh! I don't see a need for it myself. If I am going to get Blu-Ray, I'll want to watch it on a big screen. On the Mac, I can watch streamed HD content or download HD movies from several legal sources, so BD is more of a solution looking for a problem these days.

When DVD arrived, it was a huge step forward and it was a good way to deliver content. Now, everything is going streamed, BD seems to be too expensive and about to be superceded before it has gained traction.

Blu-Ray writing would be a definite benefit.

Final Cut and iMovie have been HD capable for some time now, but there's been precious few ways to actually get the content off the machine and on to any suitable media. If Apple could finally get a decent high-def media burner into one of their machines, it would be a bonus all round.

Not strictly true, blu-ray is seeing some good growth at the moment Clicky but it does clash with Apple's plan to deliver everything at full price on a once-only download through itunes. If they supply blu-ray reading it'll potentially damage takings from itunes movie rentals/purchases. However, blu-ray authoring is well overdue, especially in the mac pro. Having said that, the mac pro has gimped RAM and an out-of-date GPU, so it stands to reason they'll gimp the optical media options too.

In the UK where broadband can only really be described as sh1t, uploading any output from imovie or finalcut to a web service like youtube can take hours and is a really poor option.

Not strictly true, blu-ray is seeing some good growth at the moment Clicky but it does clash with Apple's plan to deliver everything at full price on a once-only download through itunes. If they supply blu-ray reading it'll potentially damage takings from itunes movie rentals/purchases. However, blu-ray authoring is well overdue, especially in the mac pro. Having said that, the mac pro has gimped RAM and an out-of-date GPU, so it stands to reason they'll gimp the optical media options too.

In the UK where broadband can only really be described as sh1t, uploading any output from imovie or finalcut to a web service like youtube can take hours and is a really poor option.[/quote]

All of Apple’s customer facing software seems to be focussed more on YouTube than writing to disk. Apple made a Big Thing about DVD burning when it was first capable, and another Big Thing about HD video when the HD cameras started appearing in the consumer space. However, steve Jobs a couple of years later said that it wasn’t true “HD” and since then, iDVD has not enjoyed the updates it should, and the focus of iMovie and the iPhone 3Gs is getting video onto YouTube rather than preparing media for import into iDVD.

As far as I can tell, DVD authoring at the Pro level has taken a bit of a hit too. There doesn’t seem to be any developments in DVD authoring in FInal Cut Studio.
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/whats-new.html

Look at the release history on Wikipedia to see that DVD Studio Pro 4 has not been updated since 2005. Either it is ultimately The Best DVD Writing App ever, or Apple has given up on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Studio#History

A core i7 mobile chip is very expensive... any ideas how much it will be when Apple are charging for it?

As long as it's put in a single piece of aluminium I'm sure it's worth whatever thay want to charge

Yes but if you wanted to do that having it as an option for Mac Pros is probably a much better option especially as they will have much more power to do the encoding, or can be upgraded more easily.

Personally it is not an issue for me. If it were I would not mind BD playback on a iMac. Not so sure about BD writing.

What's the biggest iMac screen without using your own, 24"?

Is there even any real point to BR viewing on a screen that size?

Apple to a 30" screen but even a 24" screen from a few feet away is big enough I would have thought. It is down to the screen resolution.

Yeah, but there seems little point to even a really good resolution with BR on a 24" screen, especially with faster moving images

My screen is 23" and the difference between DVD and even just 720p is very obvious. The detail is crisper and the action is smoother. Going back to DVD makes me think my eyes are failing.

i've seen 720p look brighter on smaller hi-res screens, but that's about it

I think the resolution is much more obvious on a high resolution monitor than on a TV. I sit about 3 feet away from my 23" 2048x1152 monitor and the detail is very obvious. My TV is 24", but I tend to sit about 3x further away.

However, the smoothness of the motion is still very apparent from any distance. I absolutely hate the bob & weave judder and comb effect you get with interlaced 25Hz video. It's especially obvious in panning shots. It doesn't help that monitors are usually 60Hz. You can't divide 60 by 25 without some real magic. Real time frame interpolation is seriously processor intensive, and well beyond any hardware I own.

DVD was fine for low-res high persistence CRT TVs, but it doesn't cut it with fast modern digital screens. Obviously the more expensive up-scaling DVD players make a big improvement, but it's just impossible to make a picture with only 240 (NTSC) or 288 (PAL) true lines of resolution look as good as 720. 1080p would obviously be better still, but I've never actually seen it!

I have a laptop with a 16" 1920x1080 screen and a Blu-ray drive.
A full HD Blu-Ray picture is clearly better than an upscaled DVD picture of the same movie on my laptop.

At normal viewing distances (for a laptop) upscaled DVDs look very noisy when viewed in full screen mode wheras Blu-rays look great.

Even on my 37" HD ready TV Blu-Ray pictures are notably better than upscaled DVDs (using a PS3).

A 24" iMac with a Blu-Ray reader would interest me as a possible option as a home PC.
Remove the Blu-Ray option and I can't see the point when a decent 24" display and base unit are cheaper and more versatile.

I've watched a lot of HD content on my iMac, it is ideal as its native resolution is 1920x1200, so 1080p plus a bit, great for working and fine for watching HD video. You can really see the difference.

I would have thought a 1080p+ screen would be ideal for Blu-Ray...

I have a 24" screen on my home machine (also 1920x1200) and a 24" 1080p screen at work, the 1080p screen at work looks dreadful when working with a PC, instead of watching HD video.