Panasonic whittles thinnest Blu-ray drive for laptops down to 9.5mm

While certain notable holdouts have yet to even announce HD disc-based products, it looks like the rest of modern civilization is getting ready to move the discs to an even slimmer set of laptops. Panasonic's latest burner for laptops is down to a mere 9.5mm thick, easily besting the company's previous 12.7mm Blu-ray drives. The drive can read and write Blu-ray discs at 2x, and supports DVD and CD read / write functions aplenty. Toshiba is on record claiming that HD DVD burners can be slimmed down to 7mm and will eventually be besting Blu-ray in this category, but so far only DVD has gone that slim. Panasonic will debut the new drive next month at CES.

[DaveBG Posted Dec 27th 2007 11:25AM]

I have PC burner that is no where near that thin but it does its job flawlessly - long live torrents :D

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 27th 2007 11:55AM]

long live torrents indeed! :)

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 27th 2007 11:38AM]

will cost to much.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 27th 2007 11:42AM]

Now that is just down right pessimistic! :-)

[brianbobcat Posted Dec 27th 2007 12:03PM]

I think one of the reasons that our favorite "notable" company hasn't announced anything is that they currently use 9.5mm drives in their MacBook Pros and I also believe in the MacBook line as well. Now that there's a drive that will fit in their professional line of laptops, and desktop sized drives have been around for a while now, I think we should expect an announcement soon, at leas that's what I'm hoping for.

-Brian

[h0mi Posted Dec 27th 2007 12:39PM]

Id settle for an elimination of non dvd burners in macbooks, so I can finally jump on a $1100 model.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 27th 2007 5:29PM]

This is pretty interesting ... I'm wondering when Apple will be announcing Blu-ray drives in their product line ... first or second quarter next year perhaps?