“If you were hoping to see a new iMac this fall with Blu-ray, then you might just be out of luck. According to a report put out by China’s HKEPC this past weekend, Intel won’t be officially supporting Blu-ray until the second quarter of 2008,” Neo blogs for MacNN.
“Every Independent Apple retail store that I’ve contacted state that they won’t offer upgrades for iMac’s optical drives, period. And although iMac’s will likely support HDMI to enable a user to connect a Blu-ray drive later on, that’s an expense that most would like to avoid when making a major purchase,” Neo writes.
Neo writes, “The question becomes, will Apple will find a way to work around Intel’s roadmap and still deliver on Blu-ray to complete the new iMac’s with OS X Leopard this fall?”
Full article here.
Blu-Ray drives are WAY too expensive right now. Even bulk orders wouldn’t drive the price down that much. You certainly wont see an iMac for $1099 with a Blu-Ray drive. More than likely it will appear in Mac Pros first, maybe Macbook Pro, but all consumer Macs last.
Macs are so avant-garde. If you do not believe me, look (and laugh) at this.
http://www.glumbert.com/media/irack
Happy Humpday to y’all.
Intel won’t be officially supporting Blu-ray until the second quarter of 2008
The Wintel Alliance Strikes Back!
Now think, we all could have had blazingly fast 9 core Cell processors, even a couple of them, and BlueRay DVD’s OEM, in our nice new shiny Mac’s if Apple would have stayed with IBM.
Did Steve jobs make a mistake?
“Did Steve jobs make a mistake?”
No.
Why does Intel need to do to support Blu-Ray?
Intel’s south bridge provides both PATA and SATA interfaces, which ever a particular Blu-Ray drive requires. The CPU and GPU can easily decode the Blu-Ray content.
It’s up to the GPU to output the decoded content to the HDMI/HDCP port. The article must be referring to the lame Intel GPU in the south bridge. There’s an easy fix for this problem, use an external GPU from Nvidia.
It would appear that the lack of HDCP support is the real limiting factor for Apple’s computers and displays at this point in time.
I think most of us can live w/out Blu-ray for awhile longer. I’d much rather have a speedy DVD burner and an external Blu-ray drive further down the road. (I’m just guessing DVD function will be slow on early B-ray drives just as CD function was slow on early DVD burners.)
I suspect very few people actually back-up to optical disc (despite their best intentions) and since there won’t be many people who have B-ray players we’ll have little need for a burner.
Not that it wouldn’t be fun to have one.
I am surprised that Apple didn’t add a build-to-order Blu-Ray option this month on the Mac Pro.
Aren’t Intel in the HD DVD camp?
Unless the market suddenly adoptions Blue-Ray, it may be beyond Q208 before Blue-Ray becomes an option for Macs…
1. Apple will leverage Blue-Ray against Sony, forcing them to pony up movies for iTunes.
2. Apple has no motivation to encourage physical media, when Apple TV-n-iTunes are Apple’s future for content delivery. Blue-Ray and HD-DVD be gone!
Should be a fun ride.
What’s the hurry for blueray? It’s to expensive and there are hardly any titles in blueray or HD for that matter. And we don’t know if either of them will last because there is no standardization. Would you really want to buy a system with blueray and find out that blueray is out and HD is in leaving you with a useless format? I wouldn’t. Better to get an external drive later with dual formats if necessary but until there is some standard HD format I don’t think buying a system with an internal drive especially an iMac would be very wise.
Blu-Ray drives still run $800 which means it’s still not nearly ready for the mainstream. Once that price drops by about 2/3 then maybe we can talk. In the meantime, DL DVD will have to suffice.
People… we’re talking about optical digital media here. This is like arguing in 1998 over AM vs FM. Bye-bye plastic discs.
“Apple iMac’s with Blu-ray coming in Q2 2008?!”
Hey MDN, you should force your headline writer to go back to middle school so they can learn how to use apostrophes. Or should I say “apostrophe’s.”
I dunno. They’re still awfully expensive, so I would suspect that if they get them, they’ll be a made to order option.
Let’s not forget that all of the DRM that the media producers forced upon Microsoft in order to let their systems support playing Blu-ray and HDDVD media. I hope Apple has enough sense to stand for it, and chooses to forego HD media if content producers insist upon it.
DRM on a song is intolerable enough, but let them keep it the F$C% off of MY computer.
I don’t care. Blu-ray and HD DVD drives are both likely to be too expensive (> $500) versus a SuperDrive (< $100). Besides, most people wil probably continue to use various magnetic media, DVDs, and dime-a-dozen CDs for storage. From what I have read about both Blu-ray and HD DVD is that both are currently answers looking for a question.
Lots of people listen to AM and FM radio and it makes money.
As long as people have thousands of dollars of CDs and DVDs in their lives they’ll want players and burners. Even though it’s old technology plastic media will be around for some time to come.
Whoever wrote this article is a moron.
Intel doesn’t need to support Blue Ray, Apple does.
And you couldn’t connect an external Blue Ray drive via HDMI, you would need USB or Firewire for that.
These factual mistakes make it obvious to me, that a certain someone is talking right out of his ass.
There you go.
From what I have read about both Blu-ray and HD DVD is that both are currently answers looking for a question.
My iTunes folder is 170GB. Figure one can only put 4 GB on a DVD-R.
170/4= 43 DVD-R’s and hours of labor sorting and burning.
Now if I had a BlueRay drive and 50GB disks.
170/50 = only 4 BR-DVD
Sure I can use hard drives, but hard drives fail from the slightest drop, can’t be mailed/traveled without some sort of bad sector corruption when the heads strike the platters and so on.
The lack of OEM Blueray in Mac’s is a SERIOUS PROBLEM.
Apple just needs to move on it and forget the format war, Apple certainly isn’t going to join Microsoft’s HD format, so they need to move.
FSCKING INTEL.
Ugh. MDN used an apostrophe incorrectly in the headline.
*sigh*
iRack. LOL.
WiseGuy:
I understand your point, but if you need to travel with 170GB of music, you must like taking loooong trips.
@Grammar Kid
Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Highly recommended reading.
Neo writes, “The question becomes, will Apple will find a way to work around Intel’s roadmap and still deliver on Blu-ray to complete the new iMac’s with OS X Leopard this fall?”
Sony has Blu-ray already in multiple models. So Sure Apple could.
“From what I have read about both Blu-ray and HD DVD is that both are currently answers looking for a question.”
The question is “Once you’ve watched some movies on Blu-Ray will you feel dissatisfied every time you watch a DVD?”
The answer is Yes.
you people are idiots sony doesnt control blueray the the blueray asociation does and they have aleady told micosoft they want them to join why not apple as well