bag of hurt

Quote of the day comes from Steve Jobs, in the post event Q&A. When asked why the (delicious) new laptops don't support BluRay, Jobs replied with this bon mot, according to MacWorld...

"BluRay is a bag of hurt," Jobs says. "The licensing of the technology is so complex that we’re just waiting until things settle down and waiting until BluRay really takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the drives."

Oh, and seriously, those laptops look delicious, don't they?

Comments

[Margaret Sippey]

Yes! Wowsers!

[Michael Sippey]

I love my white MacBook -- it's probably the best laptop I've ever owned. I want one of the new ones because (a) they look great (b) LED display and (c) nvidia graphics chip!

[test]

Yeah, I'm excited about the new laptops... my previous favorite laptop ever was my 12" PowerBook, but my white MacBook has overtaken that as best ever.

[Brian Hayashi]

Few know that the underpinnings of the iTunes DRM model comes from a licensing deal Jobs did with MPEG-LA, a rights management company formed expressly to manage the patents associated with the Motion Pictures Expert Group.

http://connectme.typepad.com/news/2005/03/risk_in_the_tim.html

Now BluRay is a completely different kettle of fish: studios won't take a one-size-fits-all approach to managed copies. The options that studios will offer (x number of legal disc backups, x number of transfers to another device) and the cost for those options (transfers could be free or sold on a per-copy basis) will vary, even among titles distributed by the same studio.

Not long ago, long-distance was held back by a complex scheme where a house in Santa Monica would pay more for a 3 minute phone call across town to Santa Ana than it would for the same length call to New York. The average phone bill was impossible to decipher until some marketing genius at Sprint got Candace Bergen to promote the Dime A Minute program - every minute, just 10 cents!

Genius!

(At least until some moron got into MCI's marketing department, but that's a story for another day.)

Will consumers be happy if the first three movies you get let you play the movie on your big screen TV or laptop, but the fourth movie only plays on the first device it was plugged into?

Hm, probably not. So why invest in a sexy technology if the consumer reaction is going to be decidedly UN-sexy??

PS Cool nav-tab. I'm digging around the new Typepad platform, great stuff.