I was told by a local computer store that the 24" iMac natively supports Blu-Ray playback...Does anyone know how this is possible? Can I just buy an external Blu-Ray drive? (I would like to be able to do this without using Bootcamp or Parallels)...
24" iMac,
Mac OS X (10.5.2),
4 GB RAM, 320GB HD, 1 TB External
I'm afraid you were misinformed, the current line of iMacs does not support Blue Ray media. I have to admit I don't know the answer to your second question though.
There are external Blu-Ray drives you can purchase and use for data disks, but at this time there is (to the best of my knowledge) no way to play a Blu-Ray video on a Mac, if that's what you are hoping to do.