Apple Falling Behind The Technology Curve?

Today DELL made good on their promise to be first to market with a sub-$1k notebook with an included Blu-Ray drive.

After doing some comparison shopping on both DELL and Apple's site, you can see that for a paltry $79 more than the low end Macbook you can land yourself an Inspiron 1525 which will burn both CD/DVD and BURN Blu-Ray. Why is a company that has pioneered DVD creation and movie making for the past 5 years still shipping their low-end notebook with a combo drive as the standard configuration? It is 2008 right? I haven't slipped into a worm hole and landed myself in the year 2001 have I?

Even at the risk of hurting movie download sales, Apple needs to start including Blu-Ray now. By the end of the year there will be over 13 million PS3 sold, and countless more stand alone players. The format is here to stay and eventually Blu-Ray will become a bullet point when a customer is deciding between an Apple computer and a competitors.

HD-DVD and the case for unlocking your media

The HD format war is over.HD-DVD has lost, and lost big. Lost in all the buzz about Blu-Ray's victory is the question of what becomes of those who purchased HD-DVDs. Short term, those people's lives haven't really changed. What happens though, a year from now when their HD-DVD player stops working? Some people have collected fairly large collections of HD-DVD movies. This is content that they have paid for, and content that is, unfortunately, locked to the disc.

In the audio world, it's easy to rip a CD, and have those files in a digital format. The same cannot be said for HD DVD, or Blu Ray. Here's a situation in which honest, law-abiding consumers have a legitimate reason to want to move the content from the original delivery medium. Let's not lose sight that that's what we're talking about here: media tied to a delivery medium, rather than a purchase. 

This is the first significant digital format to go belly-up. And while Blu Ray supporters are high- fiving each other victoriously, don't forget your format could be next.

But then again, maybe this is much ado about nothing. Perhaps this discussion will look quaint in five years. One would think once movies are delivered primarily online, the ability to play them would last as long as there are computers. What do you think? Should HD DVD movie buyers be able to convert those films to another format? Is this a problem that will go away in time? Should the studios be able to lock content to a particular delivery method?