The whole format war over high capacity DVD is going to hurt both standards. I know that Apple is not the only mfg holding off on adopting either one until the dust settles. Even content owners like movie companies don't want to commit for fear that they will pick wrong. I've also read at least one commentary saying that because todays DVDs provide everything they want, consumers don't see any overwhelming drive to adopt either of the new standards, especially with the high price of the drives.

Consumer hesitancy, hardware company caution, coupled with film industry reluctance to adopt one or the other could very well kill off both formats. At the least it'll delay widespread adoption for a long time. Nobody wants to jump first.

I doubt we'll see many HD format drives in consumer computers for a while for one main reason: both technologies are ridiculously expensive right now. By the time the price comes down enough to make inclusion in consumer machines justifiable, the format war will probably have a clear winner.

I do expect to see it in their pro tower line, though, at least as an option.

In the VHS vs. Beta battle, the inferior product won (VHS).

In the DVD+R, DVD-R battle, both seem to have won as universal drives are now available. This is unlikely to happen as the two competing formats are incompatible with one another.

Blue-Ray is much more of a technical advance in formating. This is why it had to be incompatible with what came before. HD-DVD is a just-good-enough next step being promoted by marketing types; it even has the better [marketing] name. (This is probably why Microsoft is supporting it: most of their products are of the just-good-enough type with good names.) I hope Blue-Ray appears in Macs as soon as possible. Perhaps this will put pressure on other manufacturers to adopt this superior standard. I would also like to see future Macs support the DVD-RAM standard again, my current Macs do not support this useful format.

On the manufacturer's side, they want to see one of the new formats take off in the marketplace. Outside of technophiles, most consumers see little need to spend more than $100 on a DVD player these days. The manufacurers are probably salivating at the prospect of being able to charge >$300 for about 10 years before the new format becomes a commodity item once again.

The format war will begin for me when M$ releases the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360. I for one would like to start acquiring HD content from other sources than cable. And I'm not about to drop $500+ on a dedicated player for either format.