Andre Yoskowitz
27 Oct 2012 12:25
According to Apple marketing boss Phil Schiller, customers have finally stopped asking for Blu-ray drives in their Macs.
Many of the new Macs, especially the popular Mac Air ultrabook line, do not have an optical drive to begin with, so that may be helping Apple's case.
In 2008, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs made headlines when he called Blu-ray "a bag of hurt." At the time, Jobs said: "Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace."
Two years later, Blu-ray had become mainstream but Jobs reamined anti-Blu: "Blu-ray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD - like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats."
Schiller said this week in an interview that native Blu-ray support is probably never coming to Macs: "Schiller pointed out that one major application for optical drives, software distribution, has gone largely digital. As for video, he said that "Blu-ray has come with issues unrelated to the actual quality of the movie that make [it] a complex and not-great technology...So for a whole plethora of reasons, it makes a lot of sense to get rid of optical discs in desktops and notebooks."