Apple Mac Pro with Blu-ray in February?

Apple will launch Macs with Blu-ray drives installed early next year, according to Think Secret.

Details are sketchy, to say the least, at the moment, with the only real meat being that the shipping date is slated for February. However, based on Apple's previous behaviour, we can make a few educated guesses. Blu-ray drives for computers currently sell for between $650 - $850, which means that even if Apple's wholesale price is significantly less, it will be impractical to put the drives in anything but the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro, initially at least.

This is exactly what Apple did with DVD burners when they first became available. It installed them in the top of the range Power Mac G4 and then, as prices fell, rolled them out across its range. Expect the same thing with Blu-ray drives.

Its likely, based on how Apple like to do these things, that the machine or machines, will be announced at Macworld Expo in January. Steve Jobs' Keynote will be on 9 January 2007, so put the date in your diary.Does the inclusion of Blu-ray mean that Apple has chosen that format over HD-DVD? Not necessarily. Apple is a member of the board of the Blu-ray Disc Association, so it's no surprise that it has decided to install BD drives in its Macs. However, it could conceivably still install HD-DVD drives at a later date, either as an alternative to Blu-ray, or alongside a Blu-ray drive; the current Mac Pro range has two optical drive bays. Also, it could offer BD and HD-DVD drives as build to order options.

Why do I want a BD drive anyway? Good question. The most obvious answer is to enable you to watch all those wonderful movies which are gradually coming out on Blu-ray in glorious high definition on a stunning Apple Cinema Display (that's enough with the superlatives, Ed.) The other reason is that Apple's video editing applications, Final Cut Pro, Final Cur Express, and even iMovie, all support editing high definition footage. And its DVD creation tool, DVD Studio Pro supports outputting high def. Currently users are limited to outputting to DVD, but with a Blu-ray drive and a few tweaks to DVD Studio Pro to add suport for it, Apple would finally have an end-to-end solution for creating and outputting high definition movies.