I was fortunate to have purchased my MacBook Pro with a built in DVD player and am saddened that Apple feels the need to discontinue it on all their Mac's even their desktops. Apple needs to realize that some of us have massive DVD libraries and we cannot afford to re-purchase them on iTunes and besides not all of my DVD's are available on iTunes. Also I regularly receive sermon CD's once a month and the publisher only sends them out in CD format so its nice having that CD player. I do not feel the need to digitize every single CD that I receive. These are some of my reasons why I think it was unwise to drop the DVD player on their Macs.