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The remarkably quick demise of HD-DVD, whose coffin seems to be nailed shut more securely every day and which was finally pronounced deceased when Toshiba confirmed it would stop shipping players that support the format, has led to frenzied speculation about when Apple will ship Macs with Blu-ray drives built-in.

There's much evidence to suggest that Apple's failure to thus far offer either Blu-ray or HD-DVD as an option in its computers has been a clever wait-and-see strategy, and now that we know which format will prevail that it will replace the Superdrive with a Blu-ray writer. Apple is, after all, a member of the board of the Blu-ray Disc Association and it pioneered the inclusion of DVD writers in desktop and laptop computers with the original Superdrive back in 2001. It also produces two DVD authoring applications, iDVD and DVD Studio Pro which could, presumably, be tweaked to output directly to Blu-ray. Indeed DVD Studio Pro can already author Bluray content, it just can't burn it directly to a Bluray disc. Add to that the fact that Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, is also the biggest individual shareholder in Disney and so, presumably, a large chunk of the future value of his stock is dependent on revenue from Blu-ray disc sales. It would seem, then, that the first Blu-ray equipped Mac is just round the corner. Does that mean it will ship next week, next month, or next quarter, though?

Here's my prediction: Never.

Apple will never ship a Mac with a Blu-ray drive pre-installed. The reason, quite simply,

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is that Blu-ray media sales will never come close to those of DVD discs and that the format itself will never take off. It's little more than a short-term stop gap until the online delivery of movies and TV shows becomes the norm. It's the last gasping attempt to derive money from a physical optical disc format before cheap storage and fat broadband connections render the whole idea of physical media redundant. Blu-ray is stuck in a no-man's land between the still hugely popular DVD and the promised land of on demand, widely available, high definition downloads.

If Blu-ray is to succeed as a format it will need to sell bucket loads of movies. Forget about blank discs and computer-based applications, it's movie sales that will determine what happens to Blu-ray, and the prospects look less than glowing. The problem is that Blu-ray's biggest single advantage over DVD is capacity. It can hold more data. That increased capacity allows it to store high definition versions of movies and TV shows, rather than the standard definition versions that we're used to seeing on DVD and TV.

The problem for Blu-ray is that DVD technology has improved steadily over the years. Advancements like progressive scan, where each frame is rendered as a whole rather than being split into two fields, and upscaling, where a standard definition signal is interpolated by a chip in the DVD player and displayed in a kind of virtual high definition on TVs that support HD, mean that most of us are more than happy with the picture quality of DVD.

The vast majority of us still watch DVDs using a Scartconnected non-upscaling player. Faced with the choice of spending £50 on an upscaling player and a component cable or upgrading an entire film library to Blu-ray in order to improve picture quality, which do you think we'll choose? Sure, the real HD quality of Blu-ray is superior to upscaled video, but to most of us, the difference is barely noticeable, even on a large-screen HDTV. The Blu-ray Disc Association is faced with an uphill task if it wants to persuade us to shell out £25 a disc every time we want to watch a movie.