Today the decision that Apple made at the time to avoid including the Blu-ray format in its products seems smarter than ever. Last week, Sony already warned shareholders that the company's fiscal 2013 revenue would be much lower than anticipated, in large part due to Sony's decision to leave the PC market for good.
In this it also plays an important role in the poor economic results, the significant drop in sales And in the consumer interest of the Blu-ray format, it is largely because Sony says it does not believe the business will generate enough cash flow in the future to recoup its long-term assets.
If we remember, in 2008, the Blu-ray media was unofficially named as the next generation video standard After a long struggle with HD-DVD, however its short life has been further affected by the growth of support for the digital physical format as opposed to the optical, that is, people prefer to use or carry a hard disk with everything its content, which transport the classic DVD case or in this case Blu-ray, in addition in this equation we should include the cost per GB in both cases. In keeping with the theme, rumors began to appear regarding Apple's plans to incorporate Blu-ray drives into its product line. Steve Jobs, in October 2008, explained why Apple was not yet including Blu-ray in their products, alluding to complex implicit licenses of the format that made this process quite cumbersome.
I do not want to speak from the point of view of the consumer. It's great to watch movies, but licensing is very complex. We are waiting for things to calm down and we do not want to burden our consumers with the additional cost of them.
As of February 2009, the Blu-ray licenses it became much easier when Sony, Philips and Panasonic announced that companies wanting to make Blu-ray devices would only have to pay for a single license. This was something quite important considering the Blu-Ray patents that had been created until then with 18 companies involved in them.
However, Apple under Steve Jobs continued its approach to wait and watch how everything unfolded. The new Macs were being presented without the desired unit and the most skeptical already predicted that they would not be included for economic reasons where Apple only wanted its iTunes store to be used, seeing the capacity of the Blu-Ray a serious problem. This idea is not entirely unreasonable, knowing that Apple is an innovative company that bet in its time for digital storage with the iPod, but was not convinced that Blu-Ray was the "next step" for the new generation of Mac Mini and now the entire Mac line, do not include an optical drive.
Time has shown that Apple was right and it was only a matter of time that the Blu-ray sinking as an alternative to being a "new generation" format. The future is in the network and in digital downloading either in streaming or to store it locally, but from what seems like the time of CDs, DVDs or Blu-Rays, it has passed away always speaking in general consumer cases for the average user.
Miguel Ángel Juncos, your comment is a categorical lack of professionalism.
So Apple had to wait from 2006, when Blu-ray was released, until 2014 to realize that the format had no future.
[Edited]
Greetings from Spain.
You can give your point of view and your opinion without disrespect, that's why you have edited your comment. Apple did not include it in 2006, 2010 or 2014, keeping the DVD drive until then, due to the licenses in the beginning and its lack of foothold in the market later.
The Blu-ray format is still quite capable today and especially in some business solutions, it is in the doldrums and it is indisputable that its sales have plummeted, surviving thanks to new generation consoles and some movies.
However, the same cannot be said as a storage medium for files and content, as if the CD or DVD was in its time.