Having essentially liveblogged the iLife ’11 presentation yesterday, one thing that struck me: where’s the love for iDVD? Apple‘s DVD authoring suite hasn’t seen any new features since iLife ’08, and it’s beginning to look long in the tooth. But does it even matter? Given that Apple has thrown so much weight behind the MacBook Air, which doesn’t have an optical drive, and the Mac App Store, which delivers and installs software through the magic of the Internet, we have to ask ourselves: is the DVD well and truly on its way out?
On the surface, and knowing nothing else, it’s pretty easy to say yes. Apple likes to think of itself on the computing vanguard, and if it’s showing less and less love to its main DVD authoring suite that has to say something about its stance on the DVD as a medium.
And let’s not forget Apple’s newfound interest in Apple TV, which relies entirely on streaming content to your TV screen.
Will Apple be brave enough to drop optical drive support from its “professional” computers? Hmm.
On the other hand, I seem to recall Steve Jobs calling Blu-ray a “bag of hurt,” and the medium has done fine in the interim. We’re still some way away from being able to stream a 1080p video with high resolution and/or lossless audio over the Internet. I doubt your ISP is looking forward to that day, by the way. So the perhaps the disc itself isn’t dead, but it will live a far more specialized life in the future? Because we’re clearly at the point where it’s easy to stream a DVD-ish quality version of Toy Story over the Internet, and you can download and install Pages over the Internet, no DVD required.