Macworld has posted a roundup of recent analyst speculation on the possibility of Apple using Blu-ray in forthcoming products. Most analysts seem to agree that Apple will first include the technology on its professional "Mac Pro" line before transitioning it to its consumer products.
"Apples past practices favor bringing new optical technologies to professional systems first, said Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox. DVD-RAM and DVD-R formats are excellent examples.
The exact timing of Blu-ray's introduction into the Mac Pro is uncertain, however.
Ross Rubin, director of analysis at market-research firm NPD Group, agrees that Apple will work with the professional machines first. However, noting that Intel-based pro desktops have yet to appear, he predicts Blu-ray drives wont wind up in Apple systems for a few more months.
January would be goodthe timing for that would work out pretty well, Rubin said. It comes down to the introduction cycle, but we would see it in desktops first, no doubt.
Blu-ray is a next-generation optical disk format that can hold up to 25 GB of data per layer compared to rival HD DVD's 15 GB per layer. In April, TDK produced a 6 layer Blu-ray disk that could hold up to 200 GB when the single-layer maximum was pushed to 33 GB. Currently, Blu-ray players are scarce and cost over $1000 USD, and the format has seen several delays. Much of the industry is watching Sony's Playstation 3 game console which is expected to arrive in November 2006 and should push Blu-ray prices down.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
