Opinion: Why is Apple waiting on Blu-Ray?

Apple believes the route the HD to the living room is through iTunes and Apple TV. Apart for HD Movies no other content is available on Blu-Ray. Why increase the cost of hardware to support Blu-Ray movies?

Apple will introduce BluRay in the next Mac Pro's and then followed by the Macbook Pros on its next product refresh. Also I see a chance of a AppleTV with it in the future when prices come down. HDDVD died only just last month. I doubt Apple is going to stop product over it to add a refresh product line. It will come under the normal schedule as a optional item to start and when prices are down included as standard gear.

While there are obviously those who have jumped on the Blu-Ray train already, there is relatively little consumer demand for Blu-Ray at this point.

If Blu-Ray starts becoming emerging as the true replacement for DVD, then of course Apple will include it. But even though Blu-Ray "won" the recent HD format war, it doesn't mean that it will actually become a popular format.

I do not get the excitement over Blue Ray. Sure you get more storage, but you also get a much more restrictive DRM system. No thanks.

Apple isn't going to add Blue Ray until 1) there is great consumer demand for it, and/or 2) the cost of the drives will not increase the cost of its machines.

There is more to benefit with adding Blu-ray than playback. Mainly, Apple is missing out on the authoring market for Blu-ray. Now that there is one format you now have the ability to have a turn key authoring solution. Now you must edit on Apple hardware and move to Windows to burn a master and have a Blu-ray player for testing.

It's to expensive!

i had the opportunity to buy a blue ray player or an up sampling dvd player last week. observing that all blue ray movies cost over $30 and the blue ray player cost 4 times what the dvd player cost, guess which one I chose?

The opportunity to pay more for a mac which will let me burn disks that fit into a system which in 2008 i would not even buy for myself, well, that's just an opportunity i would be disappointed to see Apple rush to provide me. Blue ray will be great for the year that everyone is buying HD cameras for themselves, which I think could be 2009.

By the way, is anyone buying anything right now? Besides gasoline, I mean.

According to some reports on the web Blu3-Ray has a negative impact on battery life at the moment. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/29/1359207&from=rss With current low consumer demand and significant trade offs I can see why Apple is waiting for the technology to mature. Apple is well knowwn for seldom being first, but putting out a quality product when they do enter a market.

Battery life isn't a concern on the Mac Pros. I'd expect that line to get updated first with burning as that market is prime right now for authoring. Studio can now push out Blu-ray movies now, without worrying about which format is going to be around.

The iMovie (consumer) crowd, is still up in the air depending on what price point they can make a BTO.

… if he thinks a 1080p movie will be an 8GB download. It's probably at least 2x to 3x that size with a 4:3 aspect ratio. It's probably much higher for Full-HD.

As time goes on, more people buy Full-HD TVs. When they see programming like live sports programming in 1080i HD, it's a revelation. Pretty soon, standard-res and upsampled content just doesn't cut it. They'll want Full-Res HD. I want Full-HD! Blu-ray is IT.

Apple waited until the whole HD 'battle' ended. Now that it's settled, there will be MUCH more content available on Blu-ray. I look forward to the Criterion Collection releasing their catalogue in Blu-ray.