I don't think you'll ever see a Blu-ray drive offered as a standard option on any Mac.There's an outside chance it might be offered as a build-to-order option, but my gut tells me that Jobs & Company will let third parties fill this niche.

In introducing Apple TV Take Two and iTunes Movie Rentals, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that it didn't matter than Blu-ray had won the next gen optical drive war as the future is online. And he's right, at least up to a point. More and more people are downloading and buying (or, in many cases, renting) music and movies online. Not too many years in the future discs may seem as antiquated as vinyl albums or VCRs. Jobs' statement seems to be underscored by the MacBook Air, which contains no built-in optical drive (though a SuperDrive is available as an option).

However, when it comes to shiny discs, for most people, DVDs -- especially with advancements such as progressive scan -- are good enough. Especially when compared with the (much) higher price of Blu-ray players and discs (though these will certainly drop in price over time).

What's more, Gary Sumlak of [url=http://www.thumbprints.ca/]thumbprints Multimedia[/url], a company based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, that offers video-to-DVD transfer services, told me last year that “new” technologies such as Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) that use moving parts are antiquated and progressively more problematic.

Here is his reasoning: “Why is so much money and so many resources being spent increasing disc media capacities when solid state chip storage has the potential for MUCH higher capacities for similar or smaller physical size. Even with current mass marketed 8GB SD cards, a solid state array the same surface area of a DVD, has the capacity in excess of 100GB. And given the progress in increases of SD capacities (i.e. 16GB cards), potential capacity in excess of 200GB by year end 2007, is possible if not likely.

“Granted, the current retail price of solid state media is about 100x that of DVD media per gigabit, but with mass production on the scale of DVD media, the price could easily drop to the levels of current DVD media. Think of the branch-off technologies with media the size of an SD card that has the capacity of the highest capacity Blue Ray disc. Just as the reduced size and increased quality of DVD has virtually made VHS extinct, solid state media would decimate disc based formats. The list of benefits for the use of solid state media is endless!”

Of course, I could be wrong. The MultiMedia Intelligence research group says that Blu-ray DVD players and recorders will represent the largest segment of Internet Protocol (IP) enabled consumer electronics. The connected DVD equipment segment will reach nearly 50 million units by 2012, according to the research group. American Technology Research Analyst Shaw Wu thinks that Blu-ray will come to the Mac platform [url=http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/analyst_predicts_big_things_for_the_apple_tv_and_blu_ray_on_macs]sooner rather than later[/url].

However, my crystal ball says that Blu-ray will never be a standard option on a Mac or other Apple product. Thoughts? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com

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