UUronL

Yeah, those are the best!

heavy_g

A direct quote from Steve Jobs: "Blu-Ray is a bag of hurt."

Due to its complex licensing issues, I doubt Blu-Ray will ever come standard on a Mac.

swajames

Well, Jobs says a lot of things that suit at the time, but are later found to be him being a little economical with the truth as he hedged his position knowing what was in development back at the lab. Apple has indeed maintained that licensing issues are at the heart of the BluRay issue, but it's a problem that would be no less challenging for other hardware manufacturers - and they seem to have been able to overcome the problem. There's refreshed iMac is about to be released, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if BluRay was indeed standard on the new model. Time will tell!

BetterMakeWay

Yes UUronL i can't argue with you on that, but show me a single mass problem of the correlated issues.

People have been using USB and Firewire alongside for years and i never heard or personally experienced any problems with one or the other.

m630

+1, I too am anxiously anticipating the release of the new hardware perhaps as early as next month, notes have it that snow leopard has support for bluray, and the latest version of toast also supports writing discs from what I've read. The license issue is bs now, you can buy commercial BR players for under $300 now, so there is no hidden costs that make it prohibitive. Let's hope they finally release it, and let the games begin!

UUronL

The mass problem as you say -is that the vulnerability exists-.

The nature of this is not like a worm or a trojan where you might see thousands of people spontaneously affected... but that doesn't lessen the danger. Laptops are lost and stolen in staggering numbers. In US airports alone, the number of lost laptops is more than 630,000 per year. The numbers on a whole are simply staggering, with each lost or stolen laptop representing potentially mis-handled sensitive information.


The threat from Firewire is:


-If someone can gain physical access to your machine, they can use the Firewire port to hack into it - even if the disk is encrypted with the majority of FDE and file/folder solutions.

Heck, someone in a cleaning crew could perform this hack on a server that isn't in a data closet or cage at night when all the employees are gone.

UUronL

Translation:

Sony wouldn't let Apple bend them over and license it on the cheap.

I'm glad Sony held firm - they paid a lot of money to develop and then market their format effectively. It wasn't cheap to win the format war, and licensees need to pay their share for innovation - Apple of all companies should damn well know and respect that.

heavy_g

OS X plays Blu-Rays beautifully. with 3rd party software and hardware of course.
Yes, Toast Titanium does write to Blu-ray.
Final Cut Studio now exports to Blu-Ray format as well.

swajames

Don't forget the second, and often overlooked, part of Jobs' "bag of hurt" statement - ?we?re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.? People quote the former but forget the latter. I think it's fair to say things have settled down and BluRay has indeed taken off.

UUronL

Right - that thinking really makes me chuckle. The format war was declared "over" quite a while ago.


Also, let's not forget that bolstering physical media for content (HD or otherwise) is at odds with Apple's iTunes business model. You might even infer some anti-competitive intentions in Apple's delays to introduce BluRay. I can see not making it standard, but to not even sell it as an -OPTION-...?