Apple declares last MacBook Pro with an optical drive obsolete

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/apple-declares-last-macbook-pro-with-an-optical-drive-obsolete/

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

58 148 2 years ago

arstechnica.com

ijhuygft7765• 2 years ago

this makes sense... but I don't think they should have removed the audio jack from any of their product

ActorNightly2• 2 years ago

USBC headphones make more sense. Unified port for all accessories.

justworkout• 2 years ago

If that were to be the reasoning, the least they could do is provide 2 ports on phones so nobody needs a dongle to listen while charging.

YeBanKo• 2 years ago

Why though? Audio jack delivers pretty much all you need functionality for headphones and plenty of existing hardware. iPod Shuffle 3d gen was tiny, had only 3.5mm for data transfer and charging.

They remove headphone jack in iPhone 7 and added USB-C in iPhone 15. So for almost a decade the only option was proprietary lighting or bluetooth, probably resulted in a significant amount of e-waste.

ijhuygft7765• 2 years ago

What would make even more sense is a round USB plug to make it even easier to plug it in.

I'm just tired of losing my Bluetooth earbuds

pat2man• 2 years ago

The current MacBook Pro has an audio jack…

willsmith72• 2 years ago

yep, wouldn't have bought it without it. that and the lack of touch bar make the latest models awesome

thesuitonym2• 2 years ago

Yes but the GP's point still remains, they shouldn't have removed it from ANY device.

arvinsim• 2 years ago

The lack of audio jack in my iPad Pro is the main reason why I abandoned music production on iOS and just do it with my Macbook Pro.

Mistletoe2• 2 years ago

I think there’s only one real reason they removed the audio jack.

This is so gross:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/n5m2xp/oc_...

jwells892• 2 years ago

I’m sure that removal of the headphone jack helped drive sales, but it’s worth remembering that AirPods were also some of the first bluetooth earbuds that were good enough for mass market appeal, and for usage with phones especially wires can get pretty irritating. A lot more people probably would’ve switched years earlier had other companies released bluetooth headphones on par with first gen AirPods.

diebeforei4854• 2 years ago

They were definitely motivated to sell more AirPods, but Bluetooth has been a clear quality of life improvement for most people (except when using the microphone, where Bluetooth has been a quality downgrade), and the 3.5mm jack takes up a lot of space inside phones.

I'd have preferred they made a true replacement - a new wireless standard for example.

ijhuygft7765• 2 years ago

I don't think I believe these numbers... I know they are way overpriced because I paid $30 for my "clones" but still...

I also hate them because they are too easy to lose

GianFabien• 2 years ago

Carefully stored CDs and DVDs retain their contents for far longer than hard drives.

I have several external HDs that are no longer readable. Yet DVDs burnt on a 2009 MBP still read fine with an external DVD drive.

I have some early USB keys that no longer work, so I doubt that flash sticks or even SSDs are useful for backup for more than 10 years.

gjsman-1000• 2 years ago

Blu-rays are underrated for archival. 25GB or 50GB broadly available, almost impervious to scratches, even more resistant to degradation. Alas, the DRM for the movie side left a foul taste everywhere…

vel0city3• 2 years ago

100GB Blu-Rays are pretty easy to find as well.

Vt71fcAqt72• 2 years ago

Enterprise is moving away from tape to optical for archival (or so I've heard). It is rumered that AWS S3 glacier is mostly optical storage, for example.

gamepsys3• 2 years ago

I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to use a laser to etch bits onto optical media for a measly 50gb. Maybe I'm jaded with my fiber internet, 1tb sd cards, and 20tb hdds but 50gb feels like an incredibly small amount of data.

skhr0680• 2 years ago

Alas, the DRM for the movie side left a foul taste everywhere…

4.7 GB was worth the cost and effort in 2004. 25GB in 2008? Not really.

thesuitonym2• 2 years ago

Burned CDs/DVDs/BDs have a pretty long shelf-life, but the pressed ones (that you can still buy at stores!) will last much, much longer.

The question will be how long can we keep buying players/readers.

adastra22• 2 years ago

Are you sure? Most studies have shown the oppsoite. Or at least there’s a lot resting on the phrase “Carefully stored”. There are lots of ways CDs can rot in storage, not all of which are controllable or preventable.

jjav5• 2 years ago

My oldest CD-Rs are from 1994 and they still read perfectly.

Factory pressed CDs should last longer than CD-Rs (I've read).

ijhuygft7765• 2 years ago

2009 is very recent... I have HDDs from that era that are still readable...

Kerrick• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, they still sell the SuperDrive brand new on their website.

smaccona• 2 years ago

Worth noting that these won’t work with the usual garden variety USB-C hubs sporting USB-A ports; instead, you need to use an adapter as opposed to a hub[0] - maybe because of power issues? Source: I have a SuperDrive and have experienced this first hand on a USB-C-only port Mac.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102181

armada651• 2 years ago

Correct, the SuperDrive requires 5V at 1.6A while most hubs only provide the standard 5V at 1A. Any fast-charging USB-A port will work though and that are hubs that support that.

teeray• 2 years ago

Yes, away with those pesky DVDs—stream everything. Give us a portion of your income every month so that you may never pay just a single time to access some piece of media.

PradeetPatel• 2 years ago

I feel like we are moving towards a service/subscription based economy. Which definitely makes some media more accessible and equitable, and might be a mutually beneficial agreement between the producer and the consumer.

But that does raise the question of ownership. Given that now some game companies are looking to turn even single player games into a subscription based model...

drewzero113• 2 years ago

Besides ownership, the problem I see with that is that (most) people can only afford so many subscriptions, and with recent fragmentation in the streaming market there are a lot of subscriptions.

I want to see one thing on a streaming service, but I can't afford to pay monthly for that service just to watch that one thing. I would have bought the DVD and given them some of my money, but without that option I don't get to watch that thing and they get none of my money.

I suppose overall they still get somebody's money every month, so they don't mind missing out on mine... but somehow it still feels like a step backwards for digital media.

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

I have a trouble believing that everything can be a subscription when it seems like the current TV streaming subscriptions cannot even coexist with each other.

steve_rambo• 2 years ago

Accessible to whom? I'll bring the usual argument that most media is not available in my country, and many other countries. They simply don't sell it to us here, and services like Netflix are either unavailable (although Netflix itself works fine, most others don't), or give access to several percent of their library while expecting us to pay the same amount as any first grade consumer.

It's especially bad with Japanese media. Last time I checked, crunchyroll wanted the same amount of cash every month as from Americans, while giving us access to maybe 30 or 40 old titles. And any one of those can disappear at any moment, which had already happened at least once. No, thank you.

the_third_wave• 2 years ago

You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy. This is how our world could change by 2030. [1]

Oddly enough the WEF removed the linked page, it now just says Sorry, but we can’t find the page you were looking for. Maybe they are on to the fact that most people are not looking forward to their vision of the future?

[1] https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/8-predict...

al_borland10• 2 years ago

definitely makes some media more accessible and equitable

I disagree on this bit. Media is only accessible as long as the rights holders decide to play ball with the streaming service(s) the user happens to subscribe to. Constant rug pulling is going on with no sign of it stopping.

Just a few months ago I was watching Suits on Amazon Prime. I was 3 seasons in, and I went to watch (after just watching an episode the previous day) and it was now listed as needing to pay per episode. Netflix bought the rights and it was over there now. Another movie, I started watching and had to pause it halfway through, when I went back to finish it, it wanted me to pay for a rental, because their rights ran out. This is a horrible customer experience.

VHS, DVD, and BD were much more accessible. Region issues aside, if I buy a DVD it will play in my DVD player and no one can decide to take my rights to play it away mid-movie. The way streaming is today, it would be like needing to have a different DVD player for each studio, or if the VHS vs Betamax, or Blu-ray vs HD-DVD battles never ended.

One of my big[] worries is that I will grow old and want to watch the movies from my youth and be unable to because the studio went out of business, or decided that movie wasn’t worth streaming, or one of countless other reasons why access would be lost. It’s the modern day version of the “Disney Vault”, which I always hated as a kid. They’d release VHS tapes for a limited time to create scarcity and drive up demand, then pull it and release something else. My sister’s favorite Disney movie never seemed to come out of the vault.

I actually have a friend who has been messaging me pretty regularly lamenting that he wants to watch some movies from the early 2000s and can’t find them on the couple services he has. He doesn’t really know what to do. He wants to watch some movies, he is paying money every month to these companies, and he isn’t getting the content he is after. These movies are 20 years old, the studios and actors have made their money, there is no reason anyone should need to deal with these roadblocks to access. He has been talking about going back to DVD. What other option does he have? How is this accessible and equitable?

[] it’s a big worry in the realm of media, I know in the grand scheme of things it’s a small theoretical problem at the moment.

solatic• 2 years ago

I'll contrast with other commenters here and agree with you. The notion that private ownership of the arts is a good thing is very much a modern idea born of mass production. Most people prefer paintings and sculptures to be in museums, and the notion that live performers of theater or opera could ever be "owned" is abhorrent. The best means of financing the arts has always been a membership or patronage model, which very much depends on recurring subscriptions. What streaming services have done is make patronage happen on a massive scale, the sheer volume of which ensures a stable stream of financing for content that has produced what many people call the Golden Age of Television.

It's not all good; the fracturing of availability of content across streaming services impacts affordability, not to mention the return of regional releases impacts availability. Ideally copyrights would be shortened and there would be some kind of publicly funded streaming framework to provide free access to works that enter the public domain. But these are momentary challenges of what is a more widely successful model and improvement over what came before.

gamepsys3• 2 years ago

I have to imagine that spinning a disc is awful for battery life.

hulitu2• 2 years ago

Running programs is also awful for battery life. /s

skavi• 2 years ago

You can still buy an Apple USB “SuperDrive” today. Getting a large, rarely used part out of the laptop chassis is a good thing.

diebeforei4854• 2 years ago

Except most Macs no longer have USB-A ports, so you'll need an A-to-C adapter if you do buy this.

al_borland10• 2 years ago

I was in the market last year and chose against the SuperDrive. From what I was reading it seemed like they were basically selling old stock from years ago and there were a lot of issues and poor reviews as a result. It’s obviously not a product Apple cares about anymore.

I ended up going with an LG drive, which worked on the Mac without issue and should also work with other operating systems.

tptacek7• 2 years ago

Happily. I have more access to content now than I have ever had before; we live in a golden age of access to video content. I can't imagine a rational argument for going back to the era of physical media.

The weirder thing to me is "owning" a particular movie. There are so many movies, why would I want to lock myself into a particular library of them? I read an article about John Carpenter's Lovecraft influences the other day, and that night watched The Thing for the first time. Didn't have to burn a moment's thought about whether it was likely to be worth the investment and a slot on my shelves.

If I feel like watching The Thing again next year (probably with friends and some kind of drinking game attached), I'll just pay to "rent" it again. I have paid to watch episodes of The Office that I already own simply to avoid the hassle of clicking over to the other app on my Apple TV, and while I might be one of the few people to think that's funny enough to brag about, I'm confident I'm not the only person ever to have done that.

Meanwhile: we're talking about... a laptop?

Come on. Apple should not be selling a laptop with an optical drive in 2024.

croes2• 2 years ago

Good luck watching a show that got pulled iff as a tax write off.

https://www.thegamer.com/hbo-max-infinity-train-ok-ko-mao-ma...

drewzero113• 2 years ago

They weren't still selling it in 2024, the "obsolete" designation means they stopped selling it 7 years ago.

I don't buy many movies, just ones I want to watch more than once (and don't want to deal with the disappointment of finding it's moved to yet another streaming service whose additional monthly payment I can't afford). What I do much more often is rent DVDs, or borrow them from my local library.

Believe it or not, it's still more convenient for some of us in the year 2024 C.E. to go out and borrow a physical copy of a movie or TV show than deal with the hassle of giving out payment details to the streaming service flavor of the month. And this laptop is among the last to enable that convenience without being shackled to an external drive. It's old news but (apparently) some people still care.

katbyte• 2 years ago

Movies and shows are pulled from steaming services never to be seen again. Sometimes really good shows. Sucks for fans AND the people who created them

somerandomqaguy• 2 years ago

Digital media can also disappear. There's Doctor Who episodes that are missing from streaming services as well because the licensing for the music also ran out. Spec Ops: The Line was just pulled from various games services because the license for the music ran out as well. Thankfully they didn't make the pull out retroactively existing libraries. But I do worry that the next time it happens, that the lawyers may see that end users still having access to digital copy of some media is undesired.

As you say, having a DVD drive on everything may not be a priority. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's no value in owning physical media.

theshrike792• 2 years ago

Happily. I have more access to content now than I have ever had before; we live in a golden age of access to video content. I can't imagine a rational argument for going back to the era of physical media.

Please show me where I can access The Witches (2020) by Robert Zemeckis?

Or the Willow TV show from 2022

Or Final Space

Or Star Trek: Prodigy

Or Westworld

The shows and movies just disappear off streaming because some executive did the math and they'll save money by just taking things off the internet.

This is why you buy anything you want to see again or even show to your kids later on as a physical copy. (Or do the yarr-thing and hold on to the digital copy on your own hardware)

nullstyle• 2 years ago

Look, I don't agree with GP, but to measure 'owning' as 'locking yourself into a particular library' is dumb and uncharitable. IMO, when you consider people that only have the budget for one streaming service you see who is _actually_ locked into one particular library today.

Streaming didn't win this round because it saves us shelf space... it won because it's instant and the average internet goer didn't consider the downsides. Most people in my circle now are pretty bitter with the state of things.

---

All of that said... flash memory is just better than spinning media.

jjav5• 2 years ago

we live in a golden age of access to video content

It's the very opposite of that!

Yes, mainstream and a few sigmas from mainstream is easier to access than ever (if you have all the subscriptions, that is).

The obscure stuff? Good luck today. Try to find someone with the DVD or VHS.

In the VHS days you could find video rental clubs with a vast library of niche movies (such as local productions that never got distributed widely). Today those are not available anywhere, unless they happen to be selling the DVD somewhere.

nullhole• 2 years ago

Presumably you can still plug in an external usb HDD. That's a spinning disk, that can store movies.

jahabrewer2• 2 years ago

... you can still buy most stuff outright? Blu-ray exists?

wmf2• 2 years ago

You can buy Blu-rays but your Mac won't play them because it doesn't have a drive.

xvector• 2 years ago

Literally just get a NAS if this is such a big deal for you. For everyone else, spinning disks are an absurd antiquity

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

Sony has shipped >40 million PlayStation 5s, most of which have a disc drive.

userbinator4• 2 years ago

You will own nothing, and be happy.

mbudinger78• 2 years ago

Hey userbinator,

This comment is a little off topic (but related to Apple somewhat) but I saw in a 4 year old thread a comment from you that said you were in the cracking scene 10 years ago (I guess that would be 14 by now). Anyhow, I am trying to get into reverse engineering iOS apps / ARM64 and would kill to acquire the skillset. It's incredibly hard to find information anywhere about this niche. The discord channels I've found have a couple nice folks but ultimately no one really knowledgeable. And the game hacking forums seem totally dead on this topic.

Would you happen to know any good resources or groups where I can network with the right people to get into this scene? Thanks

qiqitori• 2 years ago

You could rip those streams if you really wanted to. Even an analog rip could have better quality than a DVD. (Analog rips don't really circumvent the DMCA and would be legal at least in Japan (my jurisdiction), where copying stuff (including rented stuff) is legal as long as it's for private purposes). (IANAL)

diebeforei4854• 2 years ago

It is very annoying that I can't get a DRM-Free movie anywhere other than the high seas.

al_borland10• 2 years ago

I was really hoping the movie industry would learn from the pain the music industry went through. Put all the content in every digital store, make it DRM free, and call it a day.

olliej3• 2 years ago

I mean Apple's iTunes is at this point one of the only services that lets you "buy" TV shows and movies, and download and "archive"[1] them (for whatever that means, when the sony/playstation network is allowed to say "we couldn't agree on licensing terms so you can no longer play what we said you bought"). DVDs are super annoying, I have plenty that I can no longer play because they've physically decayed without even being used in years. Of course a bunch are also region coded so I used to have to have two players, one for my home country, and one for the US. I have no reason to believe Blu-ray is any better in those regards.

[1] The iTunes DRM scheme requires your playback device to have a key, so if you don't have a device with that key you'd have to sign in, and then if apple's contracts prevent them from providing new ones maybe they get stuck in the same position.

al_borland10• 2 years ago

DRM is what prevented me from buying movies on iTunes. Music I bought there, because it was DRM free.

As long as DRM exists, it’s only worth renting, imo. “Buying” media with DRM is essentially an expensive long-term rental. It will last as long as the company decides to keep the servers up to support it.

sneed_chucker• 2 years ago

Eh. From what I've seen, needing an optical drive is pretty rare for most users these days. And when you do need one, the external USB cable variety is really cheap and works fine.

It is nice that on older laptops, like pre 2012 MacBook pros and ThinkPad T400s, you can swap the optical drive with an additional drive caddy and put multiple SSDs in the machine.

jwells892• 2 years ago

A large chunk of the remainder who still keep an optical drive around do so for personal media archival, in which case they’d want specific drives known to be well suited to that purpose (feature support, high accuracy[0], etc), and the drives built into laptops usually aren’t amazing in this regard.

[0] https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?48320-CD-Drive-A...

dishsoap2• 2 years ago

Perhaps an interesting note is that Apple should have added this particular model to the obsolete page when they updated it on 5 December 2023 [1] and 2 January 2024 [2] (as both were more than 7 years past the 27 October 2016 discontinuation date), but they forgot to add it until yesterday. They also never had it on the 'vintage' list at any point, as they have with other macs; instead it went straight from not listed to 'obsolete'.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20231206074005/https://support.a...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240107224531/https://support.a...

drewzero113• 2 years ago

It was a curious holdover and I was surprised at the time that they kept selling it as long as they did. After the retina Macs came out the writing was on the wall.

It's also worth noting these were also the last MacBook with upgradable RAM, and we're still seeing issues with insufficient stock RAM on the newest MacBook models.

LispSporks22• 2 years ago

Hope they're not gonna kill my Mid 2015 MBP anytime soon. With Open Core Patcher, it's still running the latest macOS.

opan• 2 years ago

Seeing as you're already running OpenCore Legacy Patcher, would you really be affected by them "killing" support for your machine? I guess getting official parts/repairs seems to be what you'd lose. Maybe you could stock up on the most likely to fail parts ahead of time. I'm sure third party repair shops would still be able to fix the machine even after Apple gives up on it, though.

prmoustache3• 2 years ago

Ultimately they will stop supporting x86_64 arch so even Open Core Patcher might not help you at some point.

drewzero113• 2 years ago

Does anybody have a recommendation for a slightly newer laptop (obviously not Apple) with an integrated DVD drive? My SO uses her 2012 MBP13 daily and a big advantage of that computer is that it's compact and can comfortably watch DVDs anywhere while she's working on her computer. We do have an external drive which works fine on a table but it's really cumbersome when trying to hold the computer on your lap, on a chair, on the couch, etc... you know, normal places where one might try to use a portable computer.

I've been contemplating a Thinkpad T440p but I do realize that's only two years newer (though almost infinitely more upgradable). Is there anything else with a 13-14” screen, DVD drive, and decent build quality? Or are we the only people who ever watch DVDs any more?

dishsoap2• 2 years ago

Why not just rip the DVDs to files and watch them whenever from wherever. DVDs are cumbersome and dated.

jzombie4• 2 years ago

Have you contemplated ripping the DVDs and/or using a streaming service?

I wouldn't limit my options to just having a DVD if that means compromising everything else, especially if the computer is for work.

drewzero113• 2 years ago

I've considered ripping which is fine for my own discs, but I'm not going to do that every time we go to Redbox or the public library. (Yes I'm aware Redbox also does streaming, but last I checked some things were only on DVD and they were cheaper anyway.)

We use a streaming service but things seem to be spread out across five or more of them. (And as soon as I find something I like on there, it goes away!)

I agree with the issue of compromising everything else, which is why we've stuck with a 12-year-old computer. Obviously we'd have to settle a little, I was just wondering if anyone had ideas to avoid having to change our workflow too much.

diebeforei4854• 2 years ago

Newer laptops have far, far better displays, so DVD Video (which is 480p/576p) looks jarring compared to the rest of the UI.

I tried it with an external drive and it's really not a great visual experience.

prmoustache3• 2 years ago

"watch DVDs anywhere while she's working on her computer"

Wait, what?

tommica• 2 years ago

Seems that Thinkpad e570 has a drive in it: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Performance-Business-...

and it has some upgrade possibilities: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Lenovo_ThinkPad_E570

drewzero113• 2 years ago

Thanks! I was starting to look at those too. The *70 Thinkpads seem to be the last ones with optical drives, but that's at least fairly recent compared to this MBP.

parenthesis• 2 years ago

I'm typing this reply on this

https://junocomputers.com/product/nyx-17-v3/

which I use for DVD watching every day.

drewzero113• 2 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll check it out. It's been a while since I've tried a 17 inch laptop but it sure does look nice.

xeckr• 2 years ago

I remember swapping the optical drive out for an SSD, and also swapping out the RAM sticks to double my 2012 MBP's memory. I think this was shortly before they soldered all of those things in place.

ptmcc• 2 years ago

Heck yeah I did the same and thought I was so clever, huge upgrade at the time!

drewzero113• 2 years ago

Yes, this was the last MacBook with upgradable RAM. The pre-retina Unibody MacBooks were refreshingly repair-friendly compared to what came before and after them.

atoav• 2 years ago

So that is what happens when a manufacturer forgets to stick that "never obsolete"-sticker on the case of the PC.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

I've held on to my external DVD drive for years, but I don't think I've plugged it into any of my Macbooks for 7? 8? more? years.

ijhuygft7765• 2 years ago

I think having an external optical drive is acceptable? How often do you need to read a CD/DVD/BR on the run?

sotix• 2 years ago

Does anyone have a recommended drive I could attach to my desktop PC that could rip UHD Blu-Rays, DVDs, and CDs? With the death of the mass market optical drive, I think it’s worth being able to directly convert my content to digital.

ics• 2 years ago

For those who want to read physical discs still for whatever reason I highly recommend the Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD. It does CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, can run off external power or over the USB-C connection at slightly slower speeds, is compact and lightweight. Yes, the reign of dongles is well upon us but the upside is that your best optical drive is no longer tied to one machine. I just keep the drive next to my movies and grab it whenever I want to watch something, ripping for future viewing.

I still have an older MacBook Pro with optical drive but: it doesn’t do Blu-Ray, it’s loud and thick, it’s a path for dust ingress, and another moving part that can fail in a laptop on the go.

If we ever get disc readers back, I hope it’s less spinning platter and more microscopic lidar where you just wave the disc in front of the holoscreen and it instantly reads whatever day it contains. Burning would be a different story I guess…

pangolinja• 2 years ago

M1 made apple obsolete. Cant repair my $3k computer? fuck you, you're never getting a cent from me again. 40 year Apple user, now happily a Linux user. never ever going back.

Apple declares last MacBook Pro with an optical drive obsolete

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