Re: Working Over the weekend... NOW: Back to Mac Pro speculation

[Frank Gothmann] "Blu-ray may be a "bag of hurt" with regards to licensing and implementing technology for playback of encrypted movie discs; it would be no problem whatsoever to offer burners as a bto option."

We have to be honest with ourselves here, Frank. This is Apple. They aren't going to offer an unsupported piece of custom hardware and say, "you figure it out". BluRay is available on a Mac all through third party. Apple does have limited support burning in some of the pro video software, though.

[Frank Gothmann] "Apple just doesn't like the technology, also because it is in competition with their itunes store, so they choose to ignore it. Again, they are making the decisions for their customers and what they have to like and want. "

Yeah, could be. iTunes will make them exponentially more money than a BluRay burner. Yeah, they made a decision, and it was probably a good business decision. I don't know.

[Frank Gothmann] "And isn't that also a bit the whole strategy behind the whole Mac Pro delays? "We don't really want to drop them right here and now because people will complain, especially after the "Pro debate" (people have written about the outdated tower architecture more than one year ago, way before FCPX came out) but we really don't like them anymore, they don't fit our image and the markets we want to cater to so if we just wait long enough, let them sit there without updates, new technology, with performance falling behind... less and less people are going to buy a tower, some may go for an iMac or a Macbook Pro and then, when there's really nobody buying them anymore, it makes perfect sense the drop them, announce lackluster sales, the majority will understand the reasoning and few will shed a tear". "

Again, let's be honest. If the MacPro truly brings no money, why sell it? Do you put a bunch of time, effort and resources in to your work and don't get paid for it? Apple's towers going back to the PowerPC era were never the fastest, most flexible machines. People would always complain that they couldn't shove more than two PATA drives on the meager ata ribbon that shipped with Macs, but they could put a whopping four drives in their PC with two cd drives. This is still Apple. It has always been this way. I don't know why it is so surprising.

[Frank Gothmann] "Does that mean nobody was/is buying server hardware anymore? Of course not. They just didn't buy Apple's servers. If they had been interested in those markets they would have asked why and improved their offerings."

They just didn't buy Apple servers. It's really that easy. That was a market they decided not to compete in. The personal computing sector is a different story.