14 DAY TRIAL // Rumor has it that Apple wants Blu-ray on its MacBook Pros. Why? Because it's the winning format, yet the winners had a bit of a problem delivering. Plus people still refer to optical drives quite a lot. There's this itsy bitsy problem however, and that's battery life.
AppleInsider reveals that Apple was having talks with Sony to get slot-loading Blu-ray drives on its Penryn-based MacBook Pros. As it turned out, Sony has faced a bit of a "quality" issue with the slot-loading mechanism and laser in the SuperDrives, thus offering Apple an alternative, which the latter turned down. Penryn notebooks were supposed to get Blu-ray playback ability, and only DVD/CD writing.
According to a recent Wired piece, analysts point out to the first generation of Blu-ray-equipped laptops which are a good indication that users can't get more than halfway through a regular-length movie before juice runs out completely: "Blu-ray battery life is obviously a huge concern," says Yankee Group analyst Josh Martin. "If you bought an iPhone and you couldn't watch a two-hour movie, which you barely can now, that would be a huge problem," Martin continued.
The per-year 1% power capacity improvement for notebook batteries doesn't seem to be keeping up with feature-cramming manufacturers' habits, according to the analyst. Some even claim batteries run out after just one hour of playback, in some cases, which is most certainly unacceptable for any electronics manufacturer, and especially for a pretentious one such as Apple.
"The laser that runs the show [in Blu-ray players] is a very high-power laser," notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron, pointing it out as one of the main reasons for Blu-ray's sucking batteries dry. Then, there's decoding the data. The process depends quite a lot on the CPU's speed, so for notebooks, that's adding another issue to why Apple is still holding back on Blu-ray.
However, as some of you tech-savvy folks might now, there are some (upcoming) laptops sporting enough battery capacity for Blu-ray playback, not for one, but for two "two movies back-to-back on one charge." Dell's XPS M1530 and Inspiron 1420 count among them. Dell claims that both will support 4? hours of Blu-ray playback.
So, what do you think? Will Apple still make their move?