“After calling licensing for Sony Corp.’s Blu-ray technology a ‘bag of hurt,’ Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs said his company’s new laptops won’t have Blu-ray capable drives for some time,” Steven E.F. Brown reports for The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area.
“News reports quoted Jobs saying Apple would wait until ‘things settle down’ before incorporating a product that would push up the price of Apple’s notebooks,” Brown reports.
“Jobs spoke at an event showing off new Apple notebook computers on Tuesday. He said Blu-ray discs are great when it comes to watching movies, but said their licenses are too complex. If demand grows for Blu-ray drives in Apple computers, the company will consider adding them later,” Brown reports.
Full article here.
Erik Gruenwedel reports for Home Media Magazine, “Apple is a founding board member of the Blu-ray Disc Association, which perhaps gives it first-hand exposure to a licensing process that mandates encryption, related DRM safeguards and is reportedly cumbersome and expensive.”
Gruenwedel reports, “Steve Baker, VP of industry analysis for NPD Group, believes the number of companies with a hand in the licensing process dissuaded Apple, which he said has migrated toward digital distribution rather than packaged media. ‘[Apple is] not trying to be everything to everyone like Netflix or Blockbuster,’ Baker said. ‘They’re going to keep trying to deliver economy around digital downloads. I still question why anybody would question or care whether they have Blu-ray.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Christopher G.” for the heads up.]
You wanna know hwy there’s no Blu-ray in Macs? Here’s why: Apple iTunes Store sells 200 million TV shows; ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC offer primetime lineups in HD – October 16, 2008
Wow is that hwy, NDM? Thkans!
No need for Blu-Ray.
“Don’t hold your breath for Blu-ray, Macs”
Yes, breathe in through your nose….
(I heard)
Blu-Ray is stillborn. With PPV and on-demand from the cable companies, iTunes and other web distributors as competition, BR will never be more than a niche player. (in pun intented, but fun anyway!)
I can’t remember the last time I put a disc of any kind in my computer. I’m sure Apple’s goal is to get rid of the optical drive altogether. Just think of the space inside the notebooks that will free up. If there was a 15in MacBook Air I would be all over it. Maybe once the optical drive is gone for good, they’ll stick the power brick in there…
Want Blu-Ray for your Mac…works with Toast 9. http://www.macsales.com (Other World Computing)
Not affiliated with, just a customer.
Blu-ray makes a lot of sense in Apple TV. The digital downloads can’t touch the quality and I still like to collect my movies and stick them on a shelf. It’s the ultimate in portability. They can hold off for a while but eventually, we’re going to want to burn our HD home movies to disc.
As an event videographer this is bad news. I realize that disc media won’t be around forever, but too many people want to keep their weddings/birthdays/anniversaries on physical media and the fact that Macs don’t support Blu-ray with their drives or their software (Final Cut Studio) make it harder for Mac based guys like me to compete in the field.
Apple needs to add this as an option for professionals, even if it comes at a premium price.
iTunes store is great for the U.S. What about the rest of the world? In my country iTunes store sells only music. So, yes, I want Blu-ray.
Blu-Ray is nothing more than the movie industry’s attempt to control copy protection EVEN MORE than they already do. We should all hope that Blu-Ray NEVER takes off, for the sake of the consumer’s rights.
Doesn’t BlueRay require HDMI? And HDMI is incapable of driving a 30 inch Apple monitor. That alone would give Apple pause.
And Apple always wants as few ports on their laptops as possible. Having HDMI and the mini-display connector thingie ain’t gonna happen.
I just pray the mini-display connector thingie really does become an industry standard.
For everyone who claims that Blu-ray is stillborn, or has no future, would you please open the door and come out of your house for the moment? HD downloads are technologically possible for about 5% of the US population. Globally, the percentage is a rounding error. Could someone please explain to me how is the world outside of that 5% of US households going to get their HD content?
Blu-ray clearly has a purpose and a solid future. As for Blu-ray in Mac, this sounds perfectly reasonable. The Vista mess is a big mess and one of the reasons for it is the DRM mess required by Blu-ray playback. Apple just won’t compromise their QT and iTunes playback that much, only to allow a few people today to play the few available Blu-ray discs on their laptops.
However, Blu-ray authoring is another matter alltogether, and Apple will need to jump in there right now. Steve declared 2006 ‘The Year of the HD’. We’re almost 3 years later and we still don’t have a completely integrated, smooth HD authoring workflow in iLife, the way we do SD. Blu-ray disc burning (and Blu-ray-R discs) aren’t necessary in order to deliver Blu-ray formatted content. People are buying HD camcorders in increasing numbers. There are many sub- $600 models out there, and they all shoot at 1080p/i. We can easily capture/import that HD video into iMovie 08, but how do we get it to play on grandma’s Blu-ray player? Currently, only Toast Titanium 9 and Adobe Encore can do it. The workflow is very clunky and unintuitive. We need iDVD to grow up and become iBlu-Ray. Ordinary DVD-R and DVD-R DL discs can still hold up to 1 hour of full HD in Blu-ray format. This would make life a lot easier, and would finally catch up with Sony Vegas, Pinnacle Studio, Cyberlink PowerDirector, which can not only author BluRay-formatted content, but edit AVCHD directly. No Mac application can currently edit AVCHD; those that can transcode it into something else (AIC, or Apple ProRes), adding transcoding artifacts into the video.
1.5 Gb HD Movie downloads can’t compare with 50 GB of HD Content. Something is missing and it is quality.
I have seeing many TV Shows in HD and movies and I have never used a Bluray or HD DVD player.
Hard copy of movies or TV shows are doing to disappear eventually, so why does anybody wants to stick to a decadent technology?
For a while, it looked like the Final Cut suite of applications was becoming the industry standard. But now, Apple is driving indie film makers who need to author HD content to other platforms. Sure Joe Six Pack is perfectly happy to download movies on iTunes, but what about people who have to make a living producing HD content? If DVD Studio Pro won’t support Blu Ray soon, I’m going to have to hold my nose and buy a PC and use it strictly for Blu Ray. Now, someone tell me, how is this good for Apple?
@ predrag
spot on. and nicely said.
Steve, did you get that?
I don’t give a crap about BR.
If I finally decide to get one, I will buy a standalone, I would never use my laptop or desktop to play BR movies. This is nuts.
And for data, DVDs are still too unreliable so why would I need even denser and probably less reliable disks?
What is the issue here? Does this smack of Sony et al trying to protect PSP as they did with DAT? If that is the case, I can understand AAPL’s stand on the matter.
If not, then perhaps we should all hung back and see how the dust settles before we decide whether or not the better technology was shafted.
Sometimes as has been seen in the past, a company can create a stupendous product and then fluff it by trying to go it alone thinking that all the spoils will be theirs. for example:- AAPl’s firewire, Sony’s Betamax & DAT, HD DVD, Creative’s MP3 players. Do you have any other examples?
@ Predrag
You are absolutely correct. Content producers need an end-to-end HD system. I not talking CBS or Warner Bros, I’m talking about College media dept, churches, non-profits, local news, etc.
BlueRay will go gangbusters as soon as they start coming out with $150 BR players. Apparently one thing that’s keeping that from happening is the convoluted licensing.
Maybe if the DisplayPort becomes an industry standard, BlueRay will have to support it as well. In which case, we will all owe Apple a huge thanks.
Hey, ever heard of “The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area”?
Neither have I, and I live there.
It’s not just for movies – I’d love to be able to backup my iTunes to a single blu-ray disk instead of the multiple DVDs I have to use now.
What good is blu ray for a wedding videographer when more than 99% of computer consumers don’t even have a Blu ray drive to play it on.
don’t be fooled ppl
the whiners arent going to pay $300 more for blu ray drives in laptops or $15 for blank discs. They can today buy blu-ray from 3rd party companies, but they’re not, they’re whining instead, i’m not fooled. I’m a video editor, I know. Are you guys really going to spend over $15,000 for HD cams, monitors, drives, and media in a bad economy and risk bankruptcy? No! The few that have a VERY successful HD business will proceed with or without Apple. I had to buy a $500 DVD-R drive when they first came out, why can’t you afford blu-ray drives and Toast 9?
Are you or aren’t you in business?
I also watch HD downloads (720 & 1080), so paying $400 for a Blu-ray player to watch a $20 movie is TOTALLY FANTASTIC,
if your the guy SELLING it and not BUYING it. Digital downloads are cost effective and great quality. I’ve bought 750 songs off itunes ($750) versus 700 cds x $15 = $10,000 plus!! Physical media is not worth the price or trouble.
Blu ray only needs to be an option for professionals for right now. I agree with that all the way. For consumers, people its apple, they are going to charge a premium for you to have it. Wait. instead of hoping for bluray to backup your itunes library, lets hope apple would allow us to “back it up to drive” rather than disk. that would be so much cheaper than a disc. you could easily get one of those pocket drives with enough space and put it in a firesafebox. that would benefit everyone alot quicker than paying for expensive blu-ray.
I loooooove Blu-Ray. Athough he picture quality is variable (good to fantastic) the sound is fabulous.
I would love it in my computer for archiving purposes (pictures, music etc). 40-50 Gb chiunks would be perfect.
I want it.
Excellent post Pre-Drag.
So iBlu-Ray discs could be used in the near-to-come Wii Blu-ray?
That would be sweet….
Blu-Ray is a huge waste of money. Recordable CDs and DVDs are too slow and too big for practical everyday use. Their capacities cannot keep up with emerging technologies.
A single Blu-Ray recordable disc costs $8-16 on NewEgg. 4 gig flash drives are in this cost range now and 8 gig units are approaching it. For the laptop user, the thumb drive is a lot more practical and useful.
Maclover,
There is a very large industry out there that produces video (wedding videographers, corporate video, as well as churches, etc). To future-proof their work, they are rapidly acquiring HD equipment. And it is actually quite cheap. Consumer HD camcorders can now be had for less than $500; prosumer models for about $2,000 (these are the kind that the afore-mentioned industry would want to use). Software solutions must be avaliable to them to capture, edit and deliver their work in any format that is asked for by the client, and it will more and more often be Blu-ray.
Set-top Blu-ray players will be selling for less than $200 this holiday season. They will likely outnumber VHS sales (which isn’t exactly saying much, but still; we all have VHS somewhere at home), and will be on their way to match sales of DVD players soon.
Having a playback solution in a Mac may not necessarilly be the most urgent priority (as argued by many, including the original article), but being able to use Apple’s software to intuitively and easily create HD content that could be played back on a Blu-ray set-top player will very soon be critical.
iLife brought an extremely easy and intuitive workflow for getting home movies from MiniDV into the living room of grandparents. The technology is now cheap enough to make this possible for HD. Apple needs to get this done. Blu-ray drive support can wait; this should not.
@Darrell Spice, Jr.
“It’s not just for movies – I’d love to be able to backup my iTunes to a single blu-ray disk instead of the multiple DVDs I have to use now.”
you are insane… get yourself a external HD for that
SAVE THE PLANET. STOP THE POLUTION. JERKS.
Don’t put your money in PLASTIC, TRANSPORTATION, etc.
If you have an alternative like iTunes Store.
F*ck the industry and your package formats. Buy the content not the package.
@ Maclover
I already own all the equipment I need to shoot weddings in full HD. I have almost $30,000 invested in HD cameras, microphones, cranes, Glidecams, a massive Apple Mac Pro editing system with dual 23″ Cinema Displays, etc. And yet I’m forced to cobble together an HD solution out of Final Cut Studio, Adobe Encore, and a 3rd party Blu-ray player. Given the fact that my PC-using associates have a better workflow using Windows Vista and Adobe, I don’t think it’s too much to ask Apple to support Blu-ray for its professional community. It has to happen soon.
Who cares about Blu-Ray. The average consumer is happy with their upconverted DVD player. 99% of the consumer base is not going to run out and buy a Blu-Ray player for a (in their eyes) somewhat minimal quality gain. This is not the quality leap from VHS to DVD we saw. It is the average consumer that drives the market. Put on top of the cost of upgrading the end of physical media and it just isn’t worth worrying about now. The only reason that Blu-Ray is selling at all is because it comes standard in the PS3. The people that aren’t paying for broadband are not going to pay extra for discs and players.
Peruchito:
I had an unfortunatel experience of having two external HDs fail one after another (within weeks). As they were used for backups, I was extremely uncomfortable about this. I now have a collection of about a dozen DVDs that represent most of my more-or-less permanent data (such as music, photos, etc). I still use the external HD for the Time Machine, but I no longer trust it. It’s mechanical device, with extremely high tolerances, high sensitivity to sudden motion, high sensitivity to sudden temperature changes, high sensitivity to magnetic fields (did you by accident put the drive near your subwoofer?), etc. I cannot bring myself to trusting such a device to hold a permanent record of data that matters for me. Optical media is, at this point, much more resilient. CDR has been out there for about 15 years and even the oldesd CDRs that I have from over 10 years ago are still perfectly readable. The medium has proven itself as robust and reliable.
Don’t let this stop anyone from backing up on HDs, though; you may be lucky and nothing will happen to your data.
Joe Six Pack:
You are wrong. Very many people bought large HD TV sets during past two holiday seasons. They brought them home and hooked them up to their standard cable box. They thought they were getting HD; instead, they were watching a stretched SD image (so everyone looked fat). Some surveys have shown that more than half of those who bought HDTV didn’t even know they needed a HD signal in order to see HD picture.
These are the same people who will buy Blu-ray. They won’t do much research, compare upconverted DVD with a bona-fide Blu-ray. They’ll go to Best Buy, the sales bozo will tell them that if they have a HD TV, they NEED a Blu-ray player in order to watch HD; they’ll take them to that Sony 52″ display with “Iron Man” loop, show them how spectacular the picture is, and these people will buy the player.
The average consumer will buy the Blu-ray player as soon as it drops below $200. This is the magic price (and it is the reason iPhone is now $200). Add to that the fact that they can get Blu-ray movies from Blockbuster and it will be a no-brainer decision. The only wildcard this time around is the recession (actually, depression), which may slow down the adoption — people are broke these days…
Blu-ray on macs would be a great addition. As far as downloadable video goes, iTunes is OK, but you cannot compare the quality. Blu-ray is going to remain videophiles top choice for a while. It kind of sucks that this is one area where windows users have better options.
Great posts! I agree 100%. Although I’m not in the video biz, I understand where you’re coming from.
Your experience with hard drives mirrors my own. Last year I had two, four-year old, FW/USB 160 GB LaCies that I bought within a month of each other, both fail within a couple of weeks. Fortunately, it wasn’t the drive mechanisms that failed, but the electronics of the case. I stuck them new enclosures and they were back up and running. However, like you, I can’t trust electro-magnetic media like hard drives.
As the old tech saying goes, “It’s not IF your hard drive fails, but WHEN.”
>MacDonald wrote: It kind of sucks that this is one area where windows users have better options.
That’s exactly why the Mac Fanboys won’t admit no Blu-Ray drives in the MB & MBP lines is actually a bad thing.
While AppleTV is a decent alternative, it’s not portable. It doesn’t have a BRD either. With broadband bandwidth caps gaining traction, additional downloads only adds to that problem.
Now if Apple were to add Blu-Ray to AppleTV, they’d have that trojan horse again.
I am burning blue-ray from Final Cut Pro. I use Adobe Encore with a Pioneer external blue-ray burner. Works great! I only use this as a option for clients. About 1 in 10 ask for their project on blue-ray.
there should be blu ray…but this is coming from a company that was still selling a laptop just last week with just a combo drive for over $1000.
Seriously, I do a lot of editing on my Macs and DVD burning and storage is just not enough.I already have two external HDDs.
Who has the patience to store and download 30gig movies anyways??
Apple should start a promotion that gives away like 10HD TV shows with every Mac to get people in the habit of buying and playing in HD. It would cost them very little and train people to go to itunes to buy media….if you want to topple Blue Ray you’ve got to think like a drug dealer. Give it away at first, then they’re hooked.
One thing to consider, these new MBs and MBPs may be short-lived updates.
When the Nehalem chips come out, Apple is going to be scrambling to get them in their notebooks. Nehalem is a very important blip on the radar.
Supposing Apple offered an optional BR player in 2009 and 10 percent of the mac-buying public bought them? We’re talking about approximately 880,000 macs.
Using the current Blu-Ray licensing figures Apple will pay roughly twenty-six million dollars in royalties to the BR consortium on those 880k computers!
For those of you who are into authoring, check out this video at MacVideo.
It offers a professional perspective, along with solutions for those of you like Predrag and his proponents who seem to be struggling to find a solution.
Another vote for Predrag here.
Talk to Steve on behalf of the rest of us! That mandate from us here will certainly give you standing!
(And mention the FW issue in the new MB’s while your talking to him.)
If you really think Blu-Ray is a great idea… look at the wiki page for Blu-Ray towards the bottom, under the DRM section. BD+ actually has an application that can launch and check the hardware (your mac). I am not sure I would want to open this door (or rootkit) on the Mac.
I don’t think this is an Apple corp greed thing… or Apple trying to corner the market on downloads as much as it is a BS Blu-Ray DRM system that Apple is against. Steve does not like DRM because he knows his customers do not like DRM.
Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it!
The Dude abides.
The Dude:
just minor nitpick correction: Apple Corp. is the record label of Beatles; Apple Inc. is our computer company.
G4Dualie:
Yes, these are, for now, perfectly acceptable solution. I have known about them and I’m sure, most people in the industry are aware as well. They underscore the point that there is a market for Blu-ray burners. I for one will be patient and wait until the dust settles, the licensing for all that stuff comes down and Apple decides it is now worthwhile to put them into their consumer products. Meanwhile, I will author my Blu-ray content in Toast (and perhaps in Encore, if I decide it’s worth the investment) and burn it onto ordinary DVD-DL discs. One hour of HD content per disc is perfectly adequete for my needs right now, so 30- or 50GB Blu-ray discs aren’t too necessary for me.
@Peruchito
you are insane… get yourself a external HD for that
Insane? Hardly – I’ve had a number of drives fail over the years. I do use external HD for Time Machine, but because of failed drives I like to have other backups as well. It’s also conducive to keeping offsite backups.
Some people suggest using flash drives, but I’ve got over 32GB of music and a 64GB flash drive is over $200. Sure blu-ray media is expensive now(about $5 per disc bulk), but so were CDRs and DVD-Rs at one point.
iBlu-Ray?
I thought your Mom Bluray
The solution for Apple is simple and straightforward – sell combination HD downloads and Blu-Ray disks through iTunes.
HD downloads are encoded at lower bit rates and provide instant gratification, albeit at lower quality. The BD arrives a few days later for archival and high quality viewing at 1080p.
Expecting to buy BD equivalent quality video on a flash drive is unrealistic. A 32-64 GB drive costs way too much in the near term.
The DisplayPort connector on the new MacBooks can be adapted to DVI or HDMI. HDCP runs over HDMI or DVI. DisplayPort has yet another encryption format.
I don’t want it as a player necessarily, I want it as a recorder! Hopefully apple will figure out a way to deal with this.
Blue Ray?? I think Apple is correct in holding off on this technology. Right now it is expensive and yet to be shown as the successor to the ordinary DVD. It may be an answer looking for a problem to solve.
One thing going for blue ray is the fact that most regular people are not going to want to download movies and then watch them. Most people just want to stick the disk into the machine and play the movie. Of course, they can do that quite well with regular DVD’s so that is not a reason to move to Blue Ray. No rush to go to Blue Ray as far as I can tell.
Blu-ray will follow DVD as CD followed DVD.We’re now in the position where the premium for readers is small (About $80). Once more readers get out there, media prices will drop and eventually you’ll consider a machine without Blu-ray to be as obsolete as one that doesn’t come with a DVD burner would be considered today.
Let’s discuss Blu-ray licensing for a moment…
Apple is a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association. As such, does Apple even need to pay royalties for Blu-ray technology? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, so let’s assume for now that Apple, Dell, HP and some other members of the Association do indeed have to pay royalties.
Let’s also assume that G4Dualie’s math is correct, in which case Apple would pay about $US30 in licensing fees per Mac — which seems a rather high fee structure to me. Let’s assume even further that Apple will need to pay more licensing fees in order to add Blu-ray support to OS X, iLife, etc. For the sake of argument, let’s say the total licensing cost of Blu-ray for Apple is US$100 per Mac.
Dell, HP (both members of the Blu-ray Disk Association), and others have been providing reasonably-priced Blu-ray options in an impressive number of computers — even in laptops. Adding a BD-R drive to an HP desktop costs about US$250.
What all of this means is that a BD-R drive should cost about US$350 to add to a Mac Pro. I’m sure that many Apple customers would happily pay US$350 BD-R capabilities.
PS: Predrag is correct that, worldwide, relatively few people can download HD content.
@Thinker
All of which makes perfect sense for a playback solution but I fear that a few here are looking to Apple for the software that accompanies a read/write solution and I wouldn’t be holding my breath.
If we are talking about a read/write solution, then the issue isn’t just about the money, it’s about the labor and sweat equity of double-tracking two different systems; maintaining a time-tested, relatively risk-free solution for clients paying the bills, while implementing a new one that siphons off the balance of my free time with no assurance that my clients will even embrace it. Until I’ve had time to factor in all of the known and unknowns how can I put it to work, much less sell it? And if Apple isn’t talking then we’re at an impasse. This is strictly a back office solution for the time being.
But, if all we’re talking about is a player and a movie, oh hell yeah, I’m all in. But if I’m buying a player I think I’d rather have one that comes with a playstation.
While Apple is part of the BR Consortium, they are subject to the same licensing requirements as everyone else and are not immune from the political whims of said consortium, whose membership dynamic can change as their technological interests ebb and flow. DRM is the looming variable.
My thoughts are to take a wait and see approach and make due with my current processes before committing to bleeding edge solutions, especially as a businessman in this current economic climate. One misstep can be can be hard to recover from.
PS: Predrag is correct that, worldwide, relatively few people can download HD content.
And relatively fewer people use Mac much less Blu-Ray, so where’s the incentive, or the market?