Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#2"Over the past few years, Apple's been slyly but deliberately severing ties with a piece of hardware that most rational humans still view as essential on a full-scale computer."
I can count the number of times on one hand I've needed an optical drive in the last year.
In the last five years? Probably twenty times or so. I backup on the internet and use external hard drives. I stream content or view it off of an external. If I need to transfer files to someone, I do so using the plethora of online services, wireless networking, or using a thumbdrive.
I'm so very GLAD that Apple has the balls to do this.
"I've gotta say, though -- it's a wee bit difficult to shove 50GB worth of Blu-ray goodness into a North Carolina sky, and I'm saying that while residing just a few hours to the right."
I bought a PS3 years ago for Blu-ray, but I never ended up buying one for movies because the convenience of streaming and mail-in-DVDs made it easier to save space around the apartment.
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#3I've had my latest Apple laptop for a year now. I recently tried to burn a DVD for someone and realized the drive just immediately ejected everything I tried to put in -- blank DVDs, commercially-pressed CDs, etc.
I don't know if it's been damaged during or travel or it simply never worked, but the fact that it took me a full year to find out means I'll never put an optical drive on a "must have" list again. I think Apple is making the right call.
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#4PCs have been without an optical drive for years before Apple did it. I had a laptop with no optical drive nine years ago and I'm sure it wasn't original then. Granted, the experience was so poor I vowed never to live withot a built-in optical drive again.
But the time has come. In fact it might be a year or two overdue to be controversial. Now that booting from a USB flash drive is broadly supported my personal need for removable media is satisfied with just a USB port and a thumb drive. Burning a DVD to share files or boot to a rescue disk seems old fashioned and unncecessary. I don't even know where my box of recordable disks is anymore.
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#5"Over the past few years, Apple's been slyly but deliberately severing ties with a piece of hardware that most rational humans still view as essential on a full-scale computer." I can count the number of times on one hand I've needed an optical drive in the last year. In the last five years? Probably twenty times or so. I backup on the internet and use external hard drives. I stream content or view it off of an exter…
Yeah, I found this article whiney. The last time I had to use a DVD was upgrading to Snow Leopard. When I went to do the upgrade I had to take my 1 year old laptop in to get fixed because the DVD drive wasn't working on it -- it in fact probably never worked.
I remember when BluRay 'beat' HD-DVD. By the time HD-DVD was dropped by Toshiba I was already thinking "who cares? no one is going to buy bluray anyway."
I suspect within 2 years, ODD will be completely dead from a manufacturers perspective:
* Games will be acquired through app stores (all the major consoles already have these)
* Movies will come from NetFlix type streaming options (Walmart just entered the game, no?)
* Software will be from app stores as well, or USB sticks
That's not to say you won't be able to buy DVD's, it's just that devices won't have the drives.
Biggest losers? Best Buy's and similar stores. What are they going to do with all that shelf space? (I guess I've already proved myself wrong, since they still have racks of audio CD's sell to the odd 'old' person).
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#6Optical drives are rarely needed, EVERYTHING is going online and downloadable: movies, books, shopping, games, etc. Cable companies such as Comcast (xfinity) and AT&T see this. That's why they are putting in transfer caps now (250 GB/month). Their caps will not limit their own movie services. Services like justin.tv, Netflix and so on will be hurt.
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#7When I got a netbook in 2008 and realized that the optical, while possibly useful during install (USB key boot is just as good), was never missed once Ubuntu was installed and running.
Ever since then, I've felt like the drives on my other laptops are dead weight.
Apple is definitely doing the right thing... just wonder why it took them so long.
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#8What are optical drives used for? Reading and writing data? There are much neater solutions. The typical CD holds 700MB, DVDs, 4.7GB. My reusable, USB thumb drive? 16GB, and I have at least 6 ports on my computer for them.
What about Blu-Ray and movies? For a home theater, Netflix streaming isn't going to cut it. Everywhere else I am happy to stream, or have my movies downloaded through iTunes or another provider. (Movie watching rights and transferability are another can-o-worms though.) For the most part, this solves 95%+ of my on-the-road movie watching.
For music, Apple would probably prefer you just download everything through iTunes and bypass the CD, but CDs are still a major piece of the CDN for the labels. I do need the ability to rip my old CDs to my computer, but I do prefer keeping everything digitized and backed up. Then again, I haven't had to rip a CD in years.
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#9"Over the past few years, Apple's been slyly but deliberately severing ties with a piece of hardware that most rational humans still view as essential on a full-scale computer." I can count the number of times on one hand I've needed an optical drive in the last year. In the last five years? Probably twenty times or so. I backup on the internet and use external hard drives. I stream content or view it off of an exter…
Yeah, I found this article whiney. The last time I had to use a DVD was upgrading to Snow Leopard. When I went to do the upgrade I had to take my 1 year old laptop in to get fixed because the DVD drive wasn't working on it -- it in fact probably never worked. I remember when BluRay 'beat' HD-DVD. By the time HD-DVD was dropped by Toshiba I was already thinking "who cares? no one is going to buy bluray anyway." I susp…
I think you address an interesting market that will still need disks. The home-theater geek. It's not yet practical to stream the amounts of data necessary to play a full 1080p movie for 2+ hours without any noticeable degradation or stuttering. For now, if you want the best, you need a Blu-Ray drive.
Re: Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse
#10About time, and good riddance.