Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/27/editorial-apples-officially-over-the-optical-drive-for-better/

by shawndumas • 15 years ago

35 57 15 years ago

jamesteow• 15 years ago

"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.

garyrichardson2• 15 years ago

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).

dkokelley5• 15 years ago

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.

jcromartie• 15 years ago

Exactly. Optical drives are to computing today what floppy drives were in 2000. I'm pretty sure I haven't used an optical drive in a computer for over 2 years.

microtonal• 15 years ago

Well, there are people who still buy and rip CDs as a means of obtaining lossless music :).

I will not claim to hear a difference, but like lossless music for archival purposes (to avoid future lossy to lossy conversion). Besides that, some music is still not available legally online.

Still, I would like to see optical drives axed across all Mac models. I can use an external drive for this purpose, and I do not want to carry around the extra weight if not necessary.

ZoFreX5• 15 years ago

I own a couple of Plextor IDE drives still for this purpose. When it comes to ripping music, older is often better!

For any other uses though, I haven't needed a CD drive in the last year. It would have been useful when I installed Windows, merely because it's harder to lose than a USB memory stick!

bbgm• 15 years ago

Last year, my optical drive had gone bad, but I never realized until I had to rip a CD. Apple gave me a new Macbook Pro cause of the bad drive, but that is one of only three times in the last 2 years that I have tried using an optical drive (the other two were to load sample libraries)

I doubt I am going to miss one if they get rid of it, but I know others who would.

speckledjim• 15 years ago

The only time I've ever used an optical drive is to re-install the OS.

You can pick up a USB DVD drive for next to nothing for those rare times you need it.

sghill• 15 years ago

I'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.

ansy• 15 years ago

PCs 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.

ronnier• 15 years ago

Optical 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.

r00fus• 15 years ago

When 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.

dkokelley5• 15 years ago

What 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.

rsanheim• 15 years ago

About time, and good riddance.

geophile• 15 years ago

Good riddance. They add weight, I rarely use them, and they are horribly unreliable. I've run into problems with discs not ejecting, sometimes not being readable, blanks sometimes not being writeable, often issuing loud crunching noises when discs are inserted.

My 2007 MBP is dying, and I'm holding out for the next rev, hoping that the new machines won't have optical drives. I'd much rather buy a USB peripheral if I ever need it, and discard it when it gets flaky.

codabrink• 15 years ago

I can imagine that this makes the laptops much more sturdier. This is why my last 2 laptops have been without CD drives. I just bought a $50 external, and I've been having a hard time understanding why more manufacturers didn't make optical drive-less computers.

absconditus• 15 years ago

This is just like the floppy drive situation all over again. In a few years no one will care.

kaffeinecoma• 15 years ago

Yes, good riddance.

As a bonus, I'll be happy to reclaim the "eject" key for some other use. Right now on my Mac Pro (i.e. the tower- not the notebook) I hit it by mistake fairly often when reaching for delete. The drive tray then pops out loudly and scares my dog.

forgottenpaswrd• 15 years ago

Last time I used a DVD was like two years ago. What a good memories: The acceleration and spinning noises, the vibrations, the spike on consume on the powermeter, the heat and the extra weight and extra volume for carrying something you don't use at all.

fpgeek4• 15 years ago

Even for Apple's hardware customers, Apple's opinion on whether or not to deprecate the optical drive isn't entirely trustworthy.

Given that CSS has been comprehensively cracked, ripped DVDs are the most widespread and reliable source of DRM-free commercial video in the world. Apple sells DRMed video that competes with (among other things) ripped DVDs. Beyond the financial incentive, Apple wants people to buy their DRMed video because it strengthens their ties to Apple's ecosystem. This all means that Apple has substantial ulterior motives for deprecating the optical drive.

Personally, I think that as technical speed bumps are worked out and available bandwidth increases ripped video is going to follow the path blazed by ripped music, so the optical drive still has some life left in it.

ugh5• 15 years ago

So, you need an internal drive for ripping? External drives are where it’s at and Apple will gladly allow you to use them. (You can get one for the low, low price of $20 if you really want to.)

fpgeek4• 15 years ago

Need, of course not. That being said, internal drives make ripping significantly more convenient and, hence, more common (which still means incentives for ulterior motives). Defaults matter a lot and having to opt into an optical drive will make a significant difference in practice no matter how cheap and easy opting in is.

Also, if Apple is really done with the optical drive, the day will come when they won't sell the peripheral either. There will almost certainly be third-party options, of course, but Apple would have added yet another inconvenience. And so on.

Throughout this process, Apple can reasonably claim to be acting in the interests of the consumer, but the ulterior motives are still there. That means there is a credible reason to doubt Apple's claims.

ropers• 15 years ago

Did the author really just omit any mention of USB flash drives in that article? Or am I just slightly blind?

kragen• 15 years ago

My main machine for the last two years has also been optical-drive-free. Installing Ubuntu on it was kind of a pain (see http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-journal/2009-Jan... and http://canonical.org/~kragen/unetbootin.html for details) but otherwise it's been pretty much fine.

jinushaun• 15 years ago

People always bring up the floppy drive example, but I didn't remember the huge outcry over the lack of a floppy drive that everyone mentions. By the time Apple dropped support for it, I hadn't used a floppy disk in years. Sure, PC tech pundits and journalists were up in arms, but that's their job.

As for optical drives, I have probably used it maybe half a dozen times over the past few years if you don't count an XBox. What's so crazy about dropping support for it in PCs? If anything, I'm glad. It'll lead to lighter and thinner laptops.

glassx3• 15 years ago

I remember vaguely... The first iMac was released in 1997, I think?, and the outcry was because they dropped not only the floppy but also parallel and serial ports. Some people called it "a toy".

sunspeck2• 15 years ago

PSA: There's still a ton of excellent, obscure music on CD that hasn't reached the cloud. Get ripping your local libraries and dollar bins while you still can.

(Incidentally, the optical drive in my last machine, a Macbook, was as good as useless. It failed multiple times because of the flex in the plastic case. So much for impeccable Apple design standards.)

ugh5• 15 years ago

Yeah! While you still can! Because if we extrapolate from floppy drives, 2025 might be the year you no longer can buy optical drives. That’s, like, so soon!

Already now all the many users of floppies can pick from only a dozen or so floppy drives on Amazon. Abhorrent! And the money they have to pay for it! Way more than $10†! Truly horrific.

All kidding aside, you will be able to buy cheap external optical drives for a long, long, long time. There is no need at all to worry. The optical drive merely becomes an external add-on for those who truly need it. I also like to buy old music that hasn’t made it to “the cloud” and probably never will. I will keep an external optical drive in the closet for that purpose.

—

† http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000M3GODW/

sunspeck2• 15 years ago

I'm not saying that CDs will ever be inaccessible to the motivated technologist. But the media will continue to degrade and disappear at an even faster rate with optical drives no longer commonplace.

And while I'm sure that Apple buyers were among the first demographic to ditch physical media, this development is certainly another nail in the coffin of the brick-and-mortar data archives that are record stores.

Pyrodogg• 15 years ago

I've hardly used an optical drive since I first got my Lenovo X61. It was only available in the base unit which spent over 99.9% of it's life on the shelf.

However, even if I haven't used man CDs or DVDs for a while I still get a "but, but I know I'll need them someday..." reaction.

hackoder2• 15 years ago

I don't think the issue here is (just) optical drive vs no optical drive. Its the implications that are pointed to in the article, i.e. Apple controlling the hardware, software and content on the device.

Of course, Apple will not do this completely overnight, but it does seem like we're moving in that direction one step at a time. I think Apple/Steve's long term vision has always been for the PC to be like all other electronic devices; you buy it configured, and for fixes/upgrades you always go through the manufacturer or manufacturer-approved process. It is a complete opposite to something like a Lenovo ThinkPad where a lot of the stuff is user replaceable and serviceable (hence making it a little more future proof and much cheaper for upgrades).

As a MBP user, I am happy with where Apple is right now but I'm not sure I'm completely happy with where they're headed (and Apple doesn't care about customers like me who are probably < 5% anyway). Even if we look at Apple's website (for e.g. about battery), the terminology changes from 'User replaceable battery' to 'Battery that you should not replace yourself' etc. Apple could very well make the next major iteration of Mac OS similar to iOS (i.e. Apple is the only App store, no side-loading). Minor upgrades (RAM, HDD) could cost a lot and could only be done by Apple.

Something to think about before investing a lot in Apple products and becoming tangled in the ecosystem.

glassx3• 15 years ago

I've been hearing this for a couple years, and I even had some people mistakenly telling me they don't get a MacBook because they think it only runs Apple-approved software.

I don't really think it's gonna happen. "It runs Windows" is a major selling point for a lot of people I know.

But I'll be the first to jump ship if this ever happens.

hackoder2• 15 years ago

Its just a guess based on how things are moving. Won't be the first time I've been wrong about Apple :)

2muchcoffeeman• 15 years ago

The MBPs are still pretty good and parts that I want to replace are still user serviceable (RAM, HD, optical drive - everyone should replace theirs with a 2nd HD).

The Mac Minis still have user replaceable RAM but the HD is not super easy to get to.

The iMac is pretty bad. You need suction cups to remove the screen from the body to service it.

I don't think they are going to bother too much about what software you can run. But hopefully they make basic parts like the HD and RAM MORE user serviceable.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

Now, it is often easier to carry around a usb flash drive which gives higher data sizes, speed, r/w, and easier to carry. Buy a new one every 6 months and that is an ok non-enterprise local backup.

My main problem with optical at this point is that the storage capacity and price really haven't kept up with USB Flash Drives. It is also now easier just to buy an external hard drive for live backups.

sn• 15 years ago

Personally I like being able to back up my entire home directory on a single instance of write-once media. A blu-ray disc holds at least 25GB.

vl• 15 years ago

Well, while I want my next Mac to be 15" MacBook Air, I really want to have an option to plug in external BluRay drive. I do watch BluRay movies, and I want to be able to watch them on my main laptop as well.

Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse

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