New thinner iMac

[nuckinfutz]

Apple has the Mac App Store which they are promoting for application distribution.

They've gone through the effort of building in a recovery partition. iDVD is history.

Every action says that future Macs will offer optical drives as an option. There will be a lot of kvetching and anger but when a product ceases to be of use to the majority it should be excised as an integrated item.

[Geolink]

Why must we throw away the option of ripping higher quality music just to settle for low quality, fuzzier .MP3/.M4A files?

Digital is far from taking over.

[Seamaster]

Originally Posted by Geolink

Why must we throw away the option of ripping higher quality music just to settle for low quality, fuzzier .MP3/.M4A files? Digital is far from taking over.

Already has. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.

[yezza]

+1
Lol.

[Occamsrazr]

+1
Lol.

[Occamsrazr]

Originally Posted by iSayuSay

Sure. Tech is all about progress. DVD and bluray could already be gone or replaced by something new and better in a few years. But you're talking too soon to bash ODD now. Most people STILL use ODD (be it Bluray or DVD). ODD users are not living in the past. It's still the now tech. Most developers, producers still sell their contents on that rounded optical media. Maybe in your little AppStore world everything is on the cloud, being downloaded and you assume most people on earth have 1Gbps home connection to chew up 10GB of downloads or streamed content in a couple of secs. What if I dont have decent internet? Can I bring my own HDD to Apple and ask to buy and copy contents from AppStore?

Optical is still the cheapest, easiest, most practical way to distribute software, movies, games which sized in GBs. If ODD is dying, why they dont sell games or software in a USB stick then?
If anything, only a little portion of overall laptop drop ODD completely for the sake of thinness like MBA and all ultrabooks. Having external ODD is not the same as having it built in, it can be not there when you need it. Most laptop and computer out there still need it for many reasons. It's not in the past yet.

You might wanna argue and compare it to the death of floppy, or many legacy ports. But floppy didnt have added value over optical. It has smaller capacity, low read/write speed, cannot be made any cheaper, and so it was a dead end. But optical media has all the sweet spot, capacity is reasonably enough, it can be mass produced easily and inexpensive, it's thin enough to be caried around and it's still darn popular. You don't need internet to own the content. DVD is 14 years old, but mouse and keyboard are 30 years old, maybe you live in muucch more past for still using keyboard in your computer.

Apple disagreed

[yinz]

And that's all she wrote...