Is the combo-drive really THAT bad?

[milesbeyond]

I've been waiting to get my first Mac, and was really crossing my fingers for significant price drops...

My university is selling the white MacBook with the same specs as the $999.99 ($949.99 w/education discount) one on the Apple store, BUT it comes with a combo-drive. Price: $799.99 BEFORE any revisions that may be made after this announcement.

Seriously worth the $150? The reason I waited though was I wanted aluminum and the LED display and multi-touch trackpad. But is THAT worth $1249.99? Faster, right? OR should I just settle for an old MacBook Pro 15'' for $1499.99?

I'm indecisive.

[Auzburner]

It's not the price, it's the fact the Combo is obsolete and for a Mac at these prices, a superdrive is a minimum. Next the 5400 RPM HDD should be made obsolete or unacceptable for Apple. (With exceptions such as in the MacBook Air)

[G5power]

The value of the Supder drive is that with a DVD burner you can easily burn a back up disk of mass amounts of data on a cheap DVD blank.

Consider that you can easily have way more pictures, video and music files then will fit on a single CD.

It's not that the combo drive is useless, just a very low end feature.