Steve Jobs calls Blu-ray a “bag of hurt”
As an addendum to yesterday’s “Apple Tax” blog post, I read today on Macworld where Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that there are no plans to deploy Blu-ray on Macs just yet:
You know, Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don’t mean from a consumer point of view—it’s great to watch movies—but the licensing is so complex.
We’re waiting until things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives.
Yesterday, I mentioned how Brad Brooks of Microsoft thinks that by Macs not having Blu-ray that customers are getting a further “technology tax” with the absence of this hardware. Personally, I agree with Steve Jobs on this one. Adoption rates alone make it not worth messing with right now. But I can also image that licensing is pretty complex if not expensive (thanks to Sony!). My guess is that Jobs simply doesn’t want to have to raise the cost of Apple’s computers. In order to maintain prices and add Blu-ray, Apple would have to let the quality of their products slip by using inferior components to make up for the added cost. Jobs simply isn’t going to do that. And if I were the CEO of Apple, neither would I. It’s just not a good business decision.
