Steve Jobs: Blu-ray is a bag of hurt, no netbook planned

During a Q&A session following Apple's special MacBook event on Tuesday, company CEO and industry magnate Steve Jobs said Apple was holding off on incorporating Blu-ray because licensing the technology is "a bag of hurt."

Apple was an early backer of Blu-ray, but has been silent about adding Blu-ray drives to its notebooks or desktop computers. Meanwhile, Acer, HP and others have already been shipping Blu-ray drives with their systems.

"Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. I don't mean from the consumer point of view. It's great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex," Jobs said. "We're waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives."

Jobs also responded to a question about whether Apple would release a low-cost netbook -- a small laptop designed primarily for Internet usage -- which was rumored to be arriving Tuesday. The CEO told the audience that netbooks are "a nascent market that's just getting started."

"We'll see how it goes," Jobs added.

Apple did, however, lower the price of its entry level MacBook laptop to $999.