14 DAY TRIAL // Citing a reliable source, The Boy Genius Report claims iTunes 9 will be packing support for Blu-ray playback. Although the rumor is most appealing, Blu-ray drives don’t seem to be a priority for any Macintosh configuration, going by Apple’s stance on the matter.
”We’ve just received a tip from a pretty reliable source that detailed for us some of iTunes 9’s upcoming features and they’re pretty exciting,” reads the report in question. “One of the new additions to iTunes is said to include Blu-ray support which lines up nicely with a recent Apple Insider report about Apple integrating Blu-ray into their new iMac line-up.” Additionally, iTunes 9 is also said to finally allow users to visually organize and arrange their iPhone and iPod touch applications. The site believes that the yearly Apple iPod event (September) is the most likely time and place for such an announcement.
However, Steve Jobs himself noted (admittedly, a while ago) that Apple had no intention to implement Blu-ray across its line of Macintosh computers, going as far as to call the format “a bag of hurt.” Still, this is not the first time Blu-ray is said to be arriving to Mac OS X.
Around the time Apple was handing Mac OS X 10.5.5 seeds to developers, there was talk of Blu-ray making it into upcoming incremental updates to Leopard, the main candidate being OS 10.5.6. Sources telling Kevin Rose (Digg co-founder) that upcoming Mac OS X versions would support Blu-ray seem to have been unreliable, with Mac OS X 10.5.8 currently running on thousands of Mac computers worldwide, and not a single one playing Blu-ray content (at least not natively).
It is very unclear exactly how much Apple would profit from the move. As for Steve Jobs’ stance, being the visionary that he is, Apple’s CEO must have had quite a few reasons to call Blu-ray “a bag of hurt.” Nevertheless, times change.