iTunes 9 To Include Blu-Ray Support?

The Boy Genius Report has supposedly received a tip that iTunes 9 will come with  Blu-Ray support that so many people have been screaming about ever since Steve Jobs called Blu-Ray a “bag of hurt”. None the less, this might actually be true, since the new Final Cut Pro (HD) that was just recently announced includes Blu-Ray burning support IF you have a 3rd party disc drive that supports it.

One of the new additions to iTunes is said to include Blu-ray support which lines up nicely with a recent Apple Insider report about Apple integrating Blu-ray into their new iMac line-up. Something else that will most likely make a bunch of people happy is that we’ve been told iTunes 9 will finally include the ability to visually organize and arrange your iPhone and iPod touch applications. Something that wasn’t so clearly described was some kind of Twitter/Facebook/Last.fm integration. Maybe broadcasting what song you’re playing to your friends?

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Square Enix not having FFXIII demo in US :(

Final Fantasy XIII demo came out in Japan with the Advent Children Blu-ray (Click Here for more on FXIII demo in Japan). It was suppoed to come out in June in US, but it looks the Advent Children Complete Blu-ray movie will be coming alone without the demo. Why? It is because Square Enix does not want Xbox 360 games to be left out since it would technically be an exclusive PS3 demo due to the Blu-ray content. Perhaps we will see FFXIII demo on XBL or PSN in US soon.

Just What is Going on at Apple? Blu-ray? More Seniors?

The fourth beta of iPhone 3.0 was set free today, no shocker there. HOWEVER, iTunes 8.2 pre-release was also set free, and it seems like the new iTunes is hinting at Blu-Ray recognition. Take a look:

Now this is very odd indeed. Current Macs don’t support Blu-Ray, possibly with the exception of Blu-Ray drives set forth by other companies, most likely for the Mac Pros. Even worse is that Steve Jobs himself has said “Blu-Ray licensing is a mess, and it’s too much paperwork..”. So what exactly is going on? Many sources hint that iTunes will simply recognize the Blu-Ray discs, and nothing more. With WWDC around the corner, who knows what will happen.

Even more suspicious today is the fact that another chief technology officer from AMD has joined Apple, and that would be Raja Koduri. Apple is no doubt building up some serious hardware talent. All of this combined with the purchase of P.A. Semi in April 08′ could mean that the company may be developing it’s own chip for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but would this suffer just like the PowerPC did?

The Inquirer reports that Raja Koduri, currently Chief Technology Officer of the Graphics Product Group at AMD, will be joining Apple. The rumor comes on the heels of the discoveryjust two days ago that Bob Drebin, Koduri’s predecessor in the position at AMD, has already joined Apple.

Between PASemi, Bob Drebin and other things we can’t talk about yet, Apple is building up some serious hardware talent. All they need now is a good reliability person and a fire chief, and things will get really interesting on the hardware front in Cupertino.