Re: New Macbook - Deliberately hobbled?

If Apple had a way to do Blu-Ray? I'm sorry, but I have not seen any reasoning why they can't include a Blu-Ray drive in their machines, the same as everyone else does. The costs and licencing issues of professional replication are well known, but they are not the issue here. As I said before, Apple could put these drives in machines to order, and cover the per-machine licence costs in the extra charges. Whether or not they chose to develop a proper authoring solution is a completely separate issue, surely?

I don't think it's any stretch to say that Blu-Ray players (and playback) do not appeal to Apple because it would be in direct competition to the iTMS, and that's why they have not taken the first steps towards proper Blu-Ray integration. In other words, because that first step is not in Apple's financial interests, it had directly effected their pro userbase. I'm not blaming Apple - that's the financial reality. It just means that the interests of myself and Apple have diverged, and the cosy little closed world I had in Apple-land doesn't look viable now in the long term.

Here's a Steve Jobs reply yesterday to a complaint about Firewire:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/16/jobs_responds_to_outrage_over...

His response (and these responses are pretty well documented and checked) is that all new HD camcorders use USB. True. He fails to mention that (as someone else here pointed out) the iApps on Macbooks encode all those HD long-gop streams like AVCHD (I have an AVCHD camcorder) to AIC, which is now unplayable on Macbooks, as they no longer have ANY means of connecting media drives in a manner fast enough to play them. Apparently this irony is lost on Jobs. I think the article makes some interesting points, but adds near the end:

"Even so, many argue that Apple's move appears built to upsell any serious user to the MacBook Pro, which starts at $800 more than the entry level new MacBook, despite the fact that Apple continues to sell the previous-generation white MacBook, with FireWire intact, for $300 less than the new aluminum MacBooks."

Hmmm.

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