I still use my "Super"drive, but I wish my MBP didn't have it built-in. I wish it came with an external disk drive and a bigger battery/an SSD/anything else. Apple would still be providing you with a "complete" solution, but perhaps a more modern, useful solution.
Fair enough, music quality is a valid reason to want to own the physical cd, but stating it's for backup purposes is what makes me laugh. Nothing wrong with wanting physical media, I just personally have never understood why people say they need a physical backup 😀
Not everyone buys things off of iTunes, and even for those who did, it probably wasn't until fairly recently. Since I'm older than 15 years, I have lots of music that I originally purchased on CDs. I don't need to back those up since I purchased them, but I treat those physical CDs
as my backups. I haven't ripped those CDs and threw the physical disks into the trash, even if I'm unlikely to ever look at most of them again.
What I want to back up are photos, some music I got "illegally" from friends (actually, it wasn't illegal in Canada until a number of years back....), etc. I back up my data to an external HDD, but backing up to an HDD is still backing up to physical media. It will probably ALL look silly in 10 years time, when we'll be laughing that we had to back our data up to harddisks rather than "the cloud" or whatever, but until that day comes, it doesn't seem silly to use disks.
Also, I'm one of those people who still purchases physical CDs. It may seem old school, but I actually do it because I save NO money buy purchasing the digital version of an album in Australia.
Currently:
Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Pt 2 =
$20.99 at iTMS, or
$19.99 for the CD at my local bookshop. Guess which one I purchased.
😉