Psystar ships new PCs with Blu-ray drives

And Nvidia graphics

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29 October 2008 11:04 GMT / By Katie Scott

At the launch of the new MacBooks and MacBooks Pros earlier this month, pundits were just as interested in what the new machines didn't have as what they did.

In particular, Steve Jobs faced a grilling as to why there are no Blu-ray drives to which he replied: "Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace".

But now a PC manufacturer has taken a poke at Apple at the same time as launching a new line-up of computers with Blu-ray drives.

Psystar is claiming it has trumped Apple by releasing OS X-compatible PCs with Blu-ray optical disc drives and the Nvidia 9800GT graphics card.

The PC manufacturer has made a big point of drawing attention to the fact that Apple is yet to offer "these peripheral products on their own computers" in the statement marking its new launches.

"Blu-ray has already won the format war. Not only is there fully functional and mature support for Blu-ray in other operating systems but you can now rent Blu-ray discs from almost any rental chain. Blu-ray has become pervasive technology that is being widely adopted by consumers everywhere", says Psystar president Rudy Pedraza.

Pedraza also pointed out that "Blu-ray is not just for movies. The ability to burn 25-gigabyte discs is a feature that can help users in media editing or enterprise environments keep archives of large file sets. Our systems, regardless of configured operating system, can now provide this functionality."

Psystar has also introduced Nvidia's GeForce 9800GT graphics card to its line of OS X-compatible Open Computers.