Apple waits b4 adapting new tech? They adopted internal bluetooth and wifi well before most PC manufacturers did.

Not mention CD-ROM drives, USB, built-in sound... we could go on and on. Suffice it to say it's ridiculous to say Apple waits before adopting new tech.

Honestly, who pays $30 for a blu-ray or HD dvd movie?

I just rent them on Time Warner cable.

Just to extrapolate a bit on what the first couple of commenters said: if it looks like Apple is gun shy about adopting this particular bit of technology, it's because the risk completely outweighs the reward. USB they could safely push because they could at least guarantee that Apple would have a ton of USB peripherals available, and that market just exploded. But nobody seems to know what's going to happen with Blu-Ray, and there's no obviously huge demand for it now.

Will it delay my purchasing a new Mac? No, the fact that I just blew a bunch of money on camera stuff will delay my purchasing a new Mac. :)

While I don't agree with Apple holding back new technology, I personally don't see any great incentive to include BR or HDDVD yet.

Most consumers seem to agree at this point, with sales of both formats being miniscule.

Did you know you can get a slot loading Blu-Ray drive for your mac at fastmac.com? Sure it's $800, but you can get your Blu-Ray fix extra early.

I was under the impression that high capacity formats like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD won't be writable at 1st. So, until they are, the wait is more than acceptable.

Interesting.

This means they'll have to implement an evil protected video path like Microsoft did, if they plan on playing videos.

Where's the outrage, Gizmodo. Where's the outrage? You certainly bashed Microsoft enough for it.

No you can write to BR and HD-DVD, but only really at about 1X so it will be very S...L...O...W :)

I'm happy with my imac as it is now though, i don't think i will upgrade it till next year but i will get a macbook for uni in the summer!!

"Apple is infamous for waiting before they adopt new technologies, so in a sense this comes as no surprise."
It would appear that no one on here agrees. Could you provide us with an example? ;-)

A perfect example is how long it took apple to finally put cd-rw drives in it's computers, or if I remember correctly, they waited until after 802.11G was finalized (as opposed to surprisingly putting a draft version of 802.11N in their latest line).

Long Live Apple.

Apple also adopted AirPort, aka 802.11b, before it was close to being common...

... And they adopted 802.11g relatively early also (all be it not totally first), but I guess saying 'wifi' covers both of these...

They did, however, take a little bit longer with 802.11n...

802.11n is not a standard yet, and the hardware does have it anyways. Activating is $1.99, no biggie

I'd rather not have my mac be part of the disc format war. If and when the chips support the use of these kinds of discs, I'd much rather just attach a firewire external optical with this capability, not have it stuck in my system.

" Apple is infamous for waiting before they adopt new technologies"

???

What? They often adopt new tech well before the rest of the industry.

Apple also introduced the 3.5inch floppy in 1984 while PC's held onto the 5.25" standard for several years. When Apple switched to CD-ROM in the 1998 iMac everyone thought they were clueless.

On a 17, 20 or 24 inch iMac screen you won't see much difference between an upconverted DVD and Blu-Ray anyway.

Lets not forget the 3.5" disk drive. And the mouse. And the GUI. PDA's, digital cameras (QuickTake anyone?), mp3 players, SCSI, firewire, and all the other stuff mentioned above. Sure they didn't invent any of it, but they did adopt all of these things early and popularized them.

There are other early adopters besides Apple people. Take for instance Sony, I've always known their Vaio computers to come out with some of the latest technology incorporated in the system. And then there's Global Computers. They have some of the latest things too. So you should at least know that's there's more than one company that does this stuff.

@quikboy:
No one is making the argument that Apple are the only early adopters out there. They're all just (accurately) disagreeing with the article's comment that Apple are notoriously late adopters.

It's fine, it doesn't surprise me.
I just purchased a new MBP, and I have no Blu-ray media or movies, so I don't see this as a need.
It'd be neat to get them - the more we wait within an acceptable timeframe the better it is I guess - prices go down, drive speeds increase, media prices decrease, better support, etc. etc...
Good move.

a lot of people are forgetting Apple has a bad track record on optical media it seems... they were all behind DVD-RAM and literally no one else was... those machines are basically useless at this point. and it took awhile to get CD-R as well. took a bit to get combo +/-R drives too.

so it isn't entirely surprising when there is another contentious next-gen optical format "war" happening that they might sit it out a bit this time.

or wait until HVD.

The conclusion drawn by the source article (MacNN) is just dumb. So Intel won't have Blu-Ray support in their integrated graphics for a little while. SO WHAT, that's not required to play Blu-Ray discs on a a computer. Apple could easily integrate a non-Intel graphics solution that DOES support Blu-Ray -- these are available *right now*.

Example:
The 24-inch iMac can be purchased with an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT GPU (http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html). Hey, guess what, that GPU *already* supports Blu-Ray (http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_31318.html). Yes, there would be work necessary on the software side and they would need to include an HDCP key ROM to support digital output. Way to go, MacNN.

Note that they wouldn't need to include the HDCP key ROM to support the internal display, but they would need it to enable HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback on an external display through a digital (DVI or HDMI) connection.

From http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_pvhd_faq.html :

Can I view Blu-ray and HD DVD movies on my laptop or PC if I don't have an HDCP graphics card?
Laptops do not require HDCP circuitry to play high definition movies on the laptop screen. HD DVD or Blu-ray movie playback from a laptop to an external display will require an HDCP connection.

For desktop PCs, monitors with DVI input must have an HDCP graphics card to play. If your monitor has analog input (VGA and component), the movie should play as long as it is not protected by the Image Constraint Token (ICT).

ICT (which is built into the Advanced Access Copy System copy protection) will automatically reduce the quality of the image produced by a high-definition video disc player to 540 lines of vertical resolution when the player is connected to an analog display. So, when studios enable ICT in their high definition movies, users without HDCP graphics cards can still watch the movie in reduced resolution if they have an analog display. The movie will play, but not in high definition.