If you don’t have the needed equipment, you will have to upgrade your current gear – or potentially purchase newer equipment. You also need newer hardware to even think about playing a Blu-ray disc through any PC or Mac, which is yet another factor. New release commercial Blu-ray films are sold at about twice the price of their DVD counterparts, and as a storage solution, Blu-ray discs are one of the costliest solutions per GB. Internal Blu-ray drives aren’t cheap enough yet to become a no-brainer upgrade (still about $200 and up). Although Blu-ray is capable of high-quality 1080p video, a multitude of sound formats, and new interactive bonus materials (accessed through an Internet connection), let’s face it – Blu-ray is still costly when compared to DVD and streaming HD content. The Cost of Blu-rayīesides Apple’s own concerns of managing costs and maximizing profits (they are a business), everyone else is also trying to save a few bucks these days. In fact, I would not be surprised if we saw Blu-ray playback enabled in a dot update to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard by the end of next year. At that point, which is not far off, Apple would be compelled to add Blu-ray support for OS X. It shouldn’t be too much longer until Blu-ray becomes standard. Why would Apple want third parties to get all the action before it has a slice of the pie?
With the economy still recovering, Apple likely strayed away from Blu-ray to keep hardware costs down until the pricing was right for them to place large orders to add Blu-ray drives as upgrades or include them as standard equipment. With the iTunes Store now selling 720p format movies for rent or purchase, with on-demand HD video becoming widely available through satellite and cable providers, and with services such as the Roku player from Netflix offering streaming HD content, the days of the optical drive seem to be numbered.
One would have thought that since Apple was among the first proponents for this technology, it would have been one of the first to incorporate the new tech in its products. It’s strange that support for Blu-ray didn’t come sooner, since Apple was one of the first companies that pledged support for the format. This has been a bit of frustration to those who own capable Macs and has led to many discussions around the Net – and various theories. Blu-ray has clearly emerged as the winner in the high definition optical disc war, but why is there still no support for commercial Blu-ray playback in Mac OS X? Is this something we can ever expect to see?
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