While Steve Jobs may consider Blu-ray to be "a bag of hurt," the folks at Psystar have already begun to ship OS X-compatible PCs with Blu-ray drives. The company announced this week that a Blu-ray writer is now available as a $350 option on its Open and OpenPro computers.
Psystar Corporation, the leading manufacturer of OS X-compatible PCs, is now shipping PCs with Blu-ray® optical disc drives and the nVidia® 9800GT graphics card. Psystar is shipping Blue-ray® and 9800GT equipped computers before Apple's release of these peripheral products on their own computers. Apple, developer of the OS X operating system, has chosen to delay support for Blu-ray® with Apple CEO Steve Jobs citing it as "a bag of hurt" during the recent release of the new Apple notebooks. Psystar president Rudy Pedraza countered:
"Blu-ray has already won the format war. Not only is there fully functional and mature support for Blu-ray in other operating systems but you can now rent Blu-ray discs from almost any rental chain. Blu-ray has become pervasive technology that is being widely adopted by consumers everywhere," says Pedraza.
Pedraza also pointed out that "Blu-ray is not just for movies. The ability to burn 25-gigabyte discs is a feature that can help users in media editing or enterprise environments keep archives of large file sets. Our systems, regardless of configured operating system, can now provide this functionality."
Psystar has also brought nVidia's GeForce 9800GT graphics card to its line of OS X compatible Open Computers. The GeForce 9800GT brings increased graphics performance for high-end game play and media editing. The GeForce 9-series has become ubiquitous in today's PC hardware market although Apple currently does not currently offer the 9800GT on any computer.
