June 18, 2010

Blu-Ray of Death

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Blu-ray logo
Apple announced new Mac Minis this week which, I suppose, means that they’re still in the computer industry. The fanboys were disappointed that the new minis didn’t include a Blu-ray player. I’m not.

Let me get this out of the way: I hope that Blu-ray dies a quick and sudden death.

Spinning media is dead. Optical media is dead.

Ask yourself this question: When was the last time you stuck a CD or DVD into your computer? Probably the last time you installed software, right? But how long ago was that?

Answer this: When was the last time you burned a CD-R or a DVD-R?

Computer users really don’t need optical media any more. I use thumb drives to transfer or temporarily store files. I watch streaming movies on my computer.

Sure, I still buy the occasional DVD movie, some film I want to keep. I rent from Netflix. I have one of those huge, flat-screen TVs, but I don’t see any reason to buy a Blu-ray player and get Blu-ray discs. It just seems like a colossal waste of money — and so would a Blu-Ray player be on any computer.

In case you didn’t know, Blu-ray is Sony’s optical media format, which stores about five times the data of a DVD.

You need a special player to view Blu-ray discs, and it’s much more expensive (as are the discs) than DVDs or CDs.

So why bother with a Blu-ray player for your computer?

Software isn’t going to come on Blu-ray discs. Evar. No, in the future, you’ll probably be downloading most, if not all, of your computer software.

You won’t be making your own Blu-ray discs. Nope, it’ll be too expensive to do that. I’d rather buy and give away thumb drives.

Obviously, the only reason to have Blu-ray on a computer would be to watch movies. That’s obnoxious, given that you can watch movies pretty much anytime as they come streaming from the Internet.

So what point is there to Blu-ray?

As I’ve written before: Spinning media is dead. The future of the computer is all solid state. Eventually the Solid State Drives (SSDs) will be every PC’s primary storage device. Media cards and thumb drives will provide removable storage. Nope, Blu-ray go away!

2 Comments

  1. I’VE BEEN SAYING THE SAME THING FOR YEARS!!!! I still don’t, and never have, gotten what’s so great about blu ray. Has anyone ever finished watching a DVD and thought: “Gee, the quality of that video and sound could be a lot better.” I’ll answer that in a big word: NO. Red box and Netflix will be the end of movie stores. As will SSD’s will end Regular fixed drives. But one question: Why is it that I can go out and buy a 32GB flash drive for 50$, when SSD’s make every laptop about 150$ more expensive with less space than a regular hard drive? i.e. Why are thumb drives cheaper than SSD’s with the same amount of space?

    Comment by gamerguy473 — June 18, 2010 @ 2:51 pm

  2. The same storage arguments were used in the early days of the PC, gamerguy. A 20MB hard drive cost about $300 but 20 1MB floppy drives cost about $30. People used that argument to avoid buying a hard drive.

    A larger SSD requires more overhead and more reliability testing than a thumb drive. But, more importantly, there are a gazillion thumb drives out there and only a few SSDs. It’s all economy of scale.

    Believe me, when SSDs take over, there will be price drops galore. Then — overnight it will seem — only antique computers will be using rotating hard drives.

    And Microsoft still won’t have changed the Save button icon.

    Comment by admin — June 18, 2010 @ 3:01 pm

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