Add a portable Blu-ray player to your Mac (including playback software) for less than a SuperDrive

Stacksocial is offering a life preserver for new Mac owners that miss their optical drives. For the next 12 days, you can grab the Macgo Macbluray_player_system Blu-ray Player software for just $30. A total savings of 25% off the retail price of $40. The software easily allows you to play and rip Blu-rays, as well as stream to iOS devices. The perfect companion for this software is the Rosewill USB 3.0 External Slim Aluminum 6x Blu-ray drive, which is currently available for just $20 after a $50 rebate at Newegg. Update: The Newegg deal is now sold out. While it isn’t currently on sale, we recommend the Samsung 6X USB 2.0 external Blu-ray drive as a solid solution with Mac compatibility. If you are looking for a deal you can always comb through eBay to see what’s currently available.

With Apple having eliminated optical media from just about every product it makes, including the redesigned iMacs, Mac Minis, and Retina MacBook Pros, many readers will be considering whether they need to procure a separate external DVD reader for emergencies. Some folks store archives, have software installers, backups, or have vast movie collection on DVD – and then there is Blu-ray…


Apple’s remedy is the DVD SuperDrive that costs $79. The SuperDrive is an Apple-quality product and can be used as a boot drive for many Macs that need to be upgraded or repaired via DVD.

But perhaps we can get a little more for our $80?

Steve Jobs viewed Blu-ray as a “bag of hurt” from the “mafia,” and Apple would frankly rather you stick to the iTunes ecosystem for video watching. But there are many nice Blu-ray titles out there, and iTunes’ compressed 1080p content still doesn’t come close the video and sound quality of Blu-ray. So, for those thinking of dropping $80 on a SuperDrive, we think we have a better option:

So, there you have it. For less than the price of an Apple SuperDrive, you can have all the functionality of a SuperDrive PLUS the ability to read and rip Blu-ray disks.

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