Even though Apple has long been a Blu-ray backer, I think now that Blu-ray has been having just Such an unbelievable number of problems, HD-DVD drives/players are about half the price of Blu-ray and look like they will always be much cheaper, that double-sided HD-DVD's (90GB triple layer) actually have more storage than the double-sided incapable Blu-ray, the twice as high inherent expense of producing the media for Blu-ray (requiring the fancy hardened surface because so sensitive to scratches, etc). I think Apple will go with HD-DVD because they have that option. Unfortunately for Philips and Sony, they do not have the option anymore of going back and doing things differently.
My view is it's a bit like when Intel got so cocky in the days before AMD, that they thought they could pursue making a 64-bit cpu without being careful to really be smart about its design. What happened? After over like ten years development and billions of dollars and engineering resources sunken in, the Itanium, though theoretically capable of being awesome, ended up a dog, tanked ("Itanic"). Whereas a newly invigorated AMD developed the Sledgehammer in like 2 years and the Sledgehammer/Opteron still 5 years later rules the multi-CPU, 64-bit high margin, server CPU market with an iron fist. Intel ended up having to clone the Opteron's approach to 64-bit and actually utilize AMD's extensions with the 64-bit Core 2 D.
