Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

You can subscribe to this site via RSS (the humanity!) or .

A Lack of Blu-ray

I wish I could remember where I read it, but a few years ago, during the peak of the HD DVD/Blu-ray kerfuffle, someone made the point that it was likely Microsoft was supporting the less popular HD DVD because ultimately it was betting on digital video delivery and a format war that left consumers wary of physical media would buy some more time until that sort of thing was a reality. Anyway, it’s stuck with me and I was reminded of it today reading John Gruber’s response to what apple should do with Apple TV, which includes a suggestion to add Blu-ray. Gruber replies:

That would be nice. (I bought a PS3 just for use as a Blu-ray player; I would have bought a new Blu-ray equipped Apple TV instead if there were one.) But: Apple seems to have made a decision to ignore Blu-ray across the board, at least for now. Apple’s answer for HD movies is the iTunes Store.

Which is funny, because when I read the specs for the new widescreen iMac I was very surprised it didn’t include one, but this makes sense. Not that it’s a nice thing, mind you. This is likely one of those examples of Apple being evil and getting away with it, which is fine, I get how business works, but let’s at least call a spade, a spade.

October 30, 2009