iTunes and blu-ray

Despite being one of the first companies to stand behind the Blu-ray format, Apple refuses to offer Blu-ray playback to the Mac faithful.

Clearly the primary purpose of all Apple products these days is to drive you to the iTunes store. That's why there are no Blu-ray drives in Macs, no Blu-ray playback in iTunes 9, no hardware acceleration for non-Apple software in Snow Leopard and no Flash on the iPhone. Such features might encourage you to spend less money on the iTunes store. Recently, Apple finally caved in and added an FM radio to some of the new iPods.

If the Apple faithful will argue that optical discs are a dead medium, but I say there's a lot of life left in them yet. Look how long it took the DVD player to usurp the humble VCR. Blu-ray is just starting to take off, as the price of movies and players drop. Once it gets into people's rooms it will stay entrenched there for at least five years, if not ten.

Stand outside the local supermarket and ask the first 10 people who walk past if they've got decent broadband . They probably won't have a Blu-ray player either, but you can be sure they will within a few years when they replace their DVD player. Mention Video on Demand and they'll look at you like you're from another planet.

Apple is hoping it can keep the Blu-ray genie stuffed in the bottle until the iTunes store becomes the preferred content delivery model for your average man on the street. It has a long wait on its hands, but Apple's proven time and again that it's more interested in protecting its business model than giving people what they want.