And they cheered the removal of the optical disc drives because that was "yesterday's technology" even though the quality of picture & sound were superior to what could be purchased via iTunes (so that Apple could take it's cut)...
Not sure who your "they" is, but I for one continue to cheer for the removal of optical drives because external optical drives are cheap, easy to share amongst computers, and don't need to travel with me the majority of the time.
I still buy most of my movies on DVD (don't see any reason to pay exorbitant blurry prices for the enhanced blurry resolution, although my external drive does support ripping blur ays as well). They go from the packaging to the BR drive hooked up to our main computer when they get home (sometimes we directly watch them off disk the first time, but I try to send them to the archives first), get ripped, catalogued, and stored on our NAS, then get played whenever we want without the annoying FBI warnings, unstoppable ads, etc.
Funny thing is, in that same house we have two laptops with DVD drives and the main iMac has a DVD drive as well. All the built-in drives have crapped the bed due to old age and no longer function. So, I went from finding the one computer in the house with a still-functional DVD drive (and then copying the files over to the server) to just plugging in the easily-replaced $50 bluray drive into the computer where I want to do the ripping/archiving.
And they rationalized paying just as much for iMacs "thinner thin" even after the functionality of that drive was removed because an ever-thinner desktop is far more important than making that desktop as functional and utility-rich as possible...
Moving functionality which is seldom used or needed at most once per household to an external drive is a clear win. Yes, it allows for a thinner desktop which makes for pretty pictures, but more importantly it makes for a computer with one fewer breakable part.
And they attacked those who found fault with removing the drive but not lowering the price for a less functional "all-in-one," beating them down and down because whatever Apple chooses or endorses is the ONE right way for all...
... reducing the price, by the $25 the drives might cost them were they purchasing them not in bulk? I'm not sure if Apple raised their profit margins by that $25 when the drive-less computers shipped, but I suspect that that decreased cost was instead transferred to other new / more expensive parts like the screen.
And they ignored the concept of media "lifetime license" and it's limitations by deeming physical discs obsolete (even though you can fully own, sell and give away the latter but can't do any of that with the former)
Lifetime license went away with DVD. Bluray has no such concept. Nor do streaming or download services (obviously). In practical terms, Bluray content has not suffered from content revocations, but neither have downloaded files. This is a streaming-only issue, quite separate from the plastic disk issue.
And they called upon everyone to buy into the cloud- iCloud in particular- suggesting that we don't need additional storage in our iDevices when we can just stream everything we need (which was music to the ears of the wireless bandwidth toll masters who had set both time-based and hard data cap tiers)...
And, in the end, they learned that they actually owned NONE of their media and that the owners could yank it right out of the cloud (and their streaming access) at any point in time with no notice and no refund.
I somewhat agree with your point here. There is no reason to be downloading everything from the cloud every time you watch it. However, I see a lot more mention of "available anywhere" than "you don't have to buy local storage" in the marketing materials. And, for the most part, cloud-stored files are available everywhere. So long as you are also locally storing them, you don't end up being at the whim of the content owners except for when you are relying on the "available anywhere" convenience (which isn't something you can even do with a blurry or dvd disk; it is only available where that disk is).
And though all of this was an Apple-engineered deal, they went with the usual and found the content owners- Disney in this case- entirely at fault for doing this to them... and our beloved Apple.
Not sure why Apple is to blame here. You are reading a lot more into the vision they are promoting than what they are actually promoting.
iTunes = convenience but not any sense of real ownership. Discs are the last of real ownership of entertainment media. Choose wisely.
False dichotomy. iTunes offers just as much ownership as disks, so long as you follow the instructions on the package and keep track of your downloaded files. You are talking about streaming-only, which is not something iTunes forces you to do (although other providers such as Amazon do ... which is why I would never buy a movie from Amazon's service). There are multiple ways to get your entertainment, all with tradeoffs.
