Sometimes even the most ridiculous post can appear credible, if it’s written with enough conviction and published on a reputable site. So when I read this post on MacNN, it took a while before I realised quite how nonsensical it is.

The post goes like this; Intel has, according to Chinese tech site, HKEPC, announced that its Eaglelake chipset will ship in Q2 2008. One of that chipset’s key features is support for Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Therefore, goes the post, any hopes of an iMac later this year with a Blu-ray drive built-in will be dashed, meaning iMac sales will suffer.

There are a number of problems with this logic. The first is that you don’t need a new Intel chipset to get a Blu-ray drive to work with a Mac, any Mac. You just buy an external drive, like this one from LaCie, hook it up to a FireWire port, and install the bundled copy of Toast. Bingo. One Blu-ray drive onto which you can burn data and from which you can read data.

The support in Eaglelake is for the HDCP copy protection used in Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies. And it’s true, you can’t watch Blu-ray movies on an external drive as things stand.

To suggest, however, that not being able to watch Blu-ray movies on an iMac will dent sales is ridiculous. For starters, including a BRD in an iMac would make it significantly more expensive. Sure, Sony can do it on the PlayStation 3, but then Sony doesn’t expect to make a profit on the PS3, it makes its money on the games. The revenue model for Apple and the iMac is very different.

In addition, there is very little demand for internal Blu-ray drives in the iMac. Aside from the cost issue, there’s the fact that Blu-ray as a movie format hasn’t taken off, let alone reached any kind of critical mass. There’s still a huge amount of uncertainty over the format battle with HD-DVD and there are far too few players in living rooms for sales of movies to reach the point where it would make sense putting a BRD in an iMac.

Regardless of when Intel ships Eaglelake, I suspect it will take well beyond Q2 2008 before Apple ships an iMac with a Blu-ray drive inside. But I’m certain that that fact won’t harm sales one bit.

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