New iMac Arrives, Still No Blu

Today Apple have unveiled various updated products, among them the latest iMac refresh, a computer which has been the subject of much speculation over the past months on whether Apple would be including a Blu-ray drive as an option - or even standard - on these flagship desktop machines.  Well, our questions have been answered with a simple 'no'.

Although it's somewhat unsurprising, it's nonetheless frustrating.  The iMac comes in two screen flavours, a 21.5" with a 1920x1080 pixel resolution or a 27" with a 2560x1440 resolution, each being perfect to show off HD source material, so why deprive it of the only disc-based high definition product available? Disregarding the attraction of Blu-ray films, how about the 50GB of storage on a Blu-ray disc?  For a company who like to appear at the cutting edge, their 8x DVD-R SuperDrive seems a little outdated.

The lack of Blu-ray will probably have little effect on the sales of the new iMac, but judging by the responses to our last post on the subject, there will be some who boycott it. 

So, will we ever see a Blu-ray on an Apple Mac?  Steve Jobs has gone on the record as saying it's a pain when it comes to licensing and has no intention of bringing Blu or HDMI to Macs, plus Apple are notorious for lower-spec/premium-price products - witness the iPhone and its far from top spec in the world of smartphones.  This time last year, reporters were commenting on missing Blu-ray from the MacBook refresh and chances are, we'll be doing the same thing again next year.

Comments

[Joe]

Well, I own an iMac and Macbook Pro. I would have been interested in the new iMac 27" if it included a Blu Ray as my XPS One from Dell includes. Without it, I will never upgrade the iMac.

[craft]

Ive been thinking of getting a macbook pro as my next laptop, but there is no way I am going to get one without blu-ray.

At this rate I will be picking up another PC laptop. Not that I would have used macOSX either way, but I did like the way they build their hardware.

[dell computers]

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