Held hostage by Apple

My five-year-old Apple PowerBook G4 has been an absolutely wonderful computer throughout my college career (I got it the second week of my freshman year!), but the poor thing is running out of hard drive space, in desperate need of a memory upgrade, and has a shot battery. It's certainly time for an upgrade, but I'm aggravated by Apple's intentional omittance of several features that I would want in my next computer.

'High-Definition' is the biggest buzz word in technology as of late. Blu-Ray players which cost $999 last year are now selling for $200 at Best Buy and Wal-Mart, and it's quite impossible to buy anything but a new HDTV. To complement the high-def home entertainment experience, computer manufacturers are including Blu-Ray drives and HDMI-out ports (HD audio and video in one simple cable) into their desktops and notebooks. This is absolutely awesome! It eliminates the need for an expensive home theater system; all you have to do is connect your notebook to your flat-screen TV with HDMI, and you're set!

But Apple, usually at the forefront of creative innovation, has incorporated neither Blu-Ray nor HDMI into any of its computers. Their excuse is that 'the licensing cost for Blu-Ray is too high,' even though Sony, Dell, HP and others have had the technology for over a year now. What Apple won't say is that the exclusion is really meant to hold the consumer hostage.

Instead of using Blu-Ray, Apple wants you to rent movies in High Definition over its own iTunes online store and connect it to an Apple monitor (which uses its own type of connection), or buy a separate AppleTV for $299 (which would then connect to your TV with HDMI). Both of these options are inferior to me, as iTunes movie selection is limited and you can't [currently] buy HD movies (you can only rent them). Apple also thinks that optical media such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are passé, and downloads are the way of the future. While I agree to an extent (I can't remember the last time I bought an actual CD), they're not giving the consumer any choice. And as far as movies go, there's currently much more selection out there beyond iTunes (hello, Netflix?!).

I love Mac software (Keynote, Pages, iMovie, Garageband, etc.) too much to abandon Apple and am willing to pay more for their products because of higher build quality. But, it's frustrating to feel like I'm held hostage to everything being Apple-branded.